Space

The Remote Sensing Problem

by Rand Simberg on May 7, 2012

in Features, Global Warming, Natural Resources, Space, Tech & Telecom

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Over at the Washington Post, in discussing the coming crisis in weathersats, the editorial board can’t resist taking an ignorant dig at George W. Bush:

The reasons for this outlook are many — some overspending on certain projects to the harm of others, costly congressional mandates that diverted resources, and a recent rocket accident. Even if those factors were ignored, says Dennis Hartman, the chair of the panel that produced the report, agency budgets would still be too low to keep the country’s earth observation system in reasonable shape. The NRC proposes restoring NASA’s earth observation satellite funding to the level seen in the late 1990s — before President George W. Bush reprogrammed money from those satellites into things such as manned spaceflight to Mars. That level stands at about $2 billion. [Emphasis added]

There were problems with George Bush’s space policy, but shifting funding to humans to Mars was never one of them. Bush’s plans were for a lunar return, not a Mars mission, though one was envisioned as a follow on in the 2020s.

NASA has spent exactly zero dollars toward sending people to Mars, unless you count the money wasted on an unnecessary new heavy-lift rocket which might, theoretically, play a role in such a mission decades from now, but whose primary mission is to sustain what remains of the Shuttle workforce with its jobs in key states and districts.

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When Commodities Analysts Should Stick To Commodities

by Rand Simberg on May 1, 2012 · 2 comments

in Natural Resources, Space, Trade

Some analysts at Barclays attempt to understand the business case for Planetary Resources, and massively fail:

Their calculations are based on Nasa’s forthcoming OSIRIS-REx mission, which aims to launch a probe in 2016 to pluck samples from an asteroid called 1999 RQ36 and bring them to Earth.

The mission’s acronym stands for “Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer” and Nasa hopes it will be home by 2023, with a couple of ounces of dirt. By then, the cost will have reached $1-billion – made up of $800-million for the vehicle, plus another $200-million for the rocket launch.

Since that outlay will return just a couple of ounces of material, the Barclays’ analysts say they could use it as a baseline to estimate break-even prices for asteroid mining. Using the metrics proposed by Barclays, the Financial Times commodities team estimates that copper prices would need to skyrocket from today’s $3.81 per ounce to $476-million for a similarly-funded space mining project to cover its costs. [Emphasis added.]

Ummmmmm…no.

First, this is a NASA mission, and NASA costs are always a poor proxie for how much it would cost private enterprise to accomplish something similar. For instance, SpaceX has spent about a billion dollars total developing two new launch vehicles and a reusable return capsule that it flew in late 2010, and is planning to fly to ISS next week. The Falcon 9 rocket itself cost the company about $300M. But conventional NASA/Air Force cost models predicted that it should have cost somewhere between $1.7B and $4B if developed under a traditional government contract. That is to say, it might have cost an order of magnitude more.

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A Bad Week For Shuttlyndra Supporters

by Rand Simberg on April 24, 2012 · 4 comments

in Space, Stimulus to Nowhere

Two serious blows were struck against the Senate Launch System this week, though based on previous behavior, when knocked down by reality, its supporters on the Hill will probably just pick themselves up, dust themselves off and continue to trot on foolishly as though nothing had happened.

First, over the weekend, on the editorial page of the Houston Chronicle, legendary NASA mission controller Chris Kraft told the Texas delegation that Houston has a problem:

The current national human exploration strategy, which is based on development of the SLS, is economically unaffordable. The SLS-based strategy is unaffordable, by definition, since the costs of developing, let alone operating, the SLS within a fixed or declining budget has crowded out funding for critical elements needed for any real deep space human exploration program. Most of these critical elements would be managed by JSC. They include the crewed lunar lander, a multi-mission space exploration vehicle (MMSEV), a deep space habitat, a lunar surface rover and other lunar infrastructure. The development of these critical elements has been delayed until the mid-2020s and the 2030s, so real human exploration beyond Earth will not begin until the late 2020s or 2030s.

This is not only politically unsustainable – it is technically unsustainable.

…SLS is killing JSC. SLS is killing Texas jobs. SLS is killing our national space agenda.

Emphasis mine. Not-so-subtle message to (Texas) Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Ralph Hall (R-Texas, Houston area), Chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, among others though he doesn’t call any of them by name: “You’re killing us here.”

Of course, he’s not complaining about pork, per se, but rather that, in supporting the giant rocket with no missions, the Texas delegation is sending it to the wrong states and districts. But given the respect in the space community for him (and his co-author, former space station director Tom Moser), attention may be paid.

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The Space Property Rights Discussion Continues

by Rand Simberg on April 16, 2012 · 4 comments

in Features, Property Rights, Space

Post image for The Space Property Rights Discussion Continues

As I (sort of) predicted last week, Tanja Masson-Zwaan, president of the International Institute of Space Law, has weighed in on the issue in an interview with Alan Boyle at MSNBC.com:

Masson-Zwaan told me trying to get around the 1967 treaty is “not the solution.”

“Things have to be agreed on an international level,” she said. “I don’t think that the treaty has any kind of ‘loophole.’”

The idea behind the Space Settlement Prize Act is that the Outer Space Treaty bars its signatories, including the United States, from asserting sovereignty over other worlds, but may not bar them from recognizing claims made by private parties. The act’s backers note that a follow-on treaty, drawn up in 1979 and known as the Moon Treaty, specifically bans private property claims — and note that the United States is not a party to that particular pact.

Wouldn’t that imply that the United States still has a free hand on private property claims? Masson-Zwaan says no. She says the private-property angle is addressed by the Outer Space Treaty, and merely reiterated in the later Moon Treaty. “It’s often so in treaties,” she said.

The key to her argument is that Article 2 of the 1967 treaty holds nations responsible for the extraterrestrial activities of their citizens. And it’s not just her arguing that. This is the view of other legal experts, including TechFreedom’s James Dunstan. (Masson-Zwaan said Dunstan’s comments were “quite well worded.”) What’s more, it’s been the stated view of the U.S. government. In 2003, a State Department official cited Article 2 in turning back a claim for parking and storage fees relating to NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft on the asteroid Eros.

Note that I addressed the Article II argument both in the Issue Analysis and in my rebuttal to its repetition. Also, while I didn’t mention in the analysis the State Department opinion on the Eros case, it was only that — an opinion of an official, and I noted that it was not at issue in the case, (as does Alan Boyle):

A later ruling in federal court rejected the claim on different grounds, saying that the claimant failed to show any property interest in Eros.

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One Small Step for Human Spaceflight

by Rand Simberg on April 11, 2012 · 1 comment

in Legal, Space, Trade

The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) have been a thorn in the American space industry’s side for almost fourteen years, ever since Congress moved the maintenance of the munitions list from the Department of Commerce to the State Department in the wake of the Loral/China satellite scandal. One of the more absurd legal consequences of the new rules is that Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s space tourism venture, had to consider non-U.S. nationals who flew to the edge of space from the American west as exports requiring a license from the State Department for each and every foreign passenger (presumably including Sir Richard himself, who is a British).

But recently, in a rare fit of regulatory sanity, Virgin Galactic’s U.S. flight operations were removed from ITAR control:

New Mexico-based Virgin Galactic, which now expects to fly its first paying customers in 2013, was told by the U.S. government that the company may fly non-U.S. citizens to the edge of space without first obtaining an export license from the State Department.

Virgin Galactic asked “that their operations be removed from the scope of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR),” Mark Sundahl, an associate professor of law at Cleveland State University in Ohio, told Space News in an April 10 phone interview. Early this year, the State Department announced “a favorable EAR99 ruling, which means that [Virgin Galactic’s] operations will not be ITAR-controlled.”

Virgin’s flight hardware, Sundahl added, would remain under export control. However, he said the determination was, on the whole, “good news for Virgin Galactic and the entire space tourism industry.”

Presumably, the ruling will also apply to XCOR Aerospace, Armadillo Aerospace and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, other companies that plan to fly passengers and researchers into suborbit, as well as SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada Corporation, which hope to deliver passengers all the way to orbit within a few years. It’s not complete relief, however:

The licensing exemption Virgin received in January from the U.S. government would not make international operations dramatically easier, according to Sundahl. He said that as long as Virgin’s hardware is made in the United States — and the company has not announced plans to manufacture elsewhere — the U.S. government will have regulatory authority over anything Virgin sends overseas to support tourist sorties to the edge of space.

This is the reason why XCOR’s recent deal with Space Experience Curaçao is based on the concept of a “wet lease.” That is, the Dutch investors won’t operate the vehicle on the island, but instead pay (American) XCOR personnel to do so. Undoubtedly they’d prefer to simply purchase the rocket planes and operate them on their own, but due to the nature of ITAR, it is simply too cumbersome legally for XCOR to apply and get approval for the export license to allow this, which may put a continuing damper on the international market for their products.

Further Space Property Rights Responses

by Rand Simberg on April 9, 2012 · 4 comments

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Natural Resources, Property Rights, Space

Since my previous post on media reaction to CEI’s press briefing on Thursday, Popular Science has provided a good report as well.

But in this post, I want to address co-speaker Jim Dunstan’s critique of the concept, which he presented at the event, and is now available on line at TechFreedom.

I should start by noting that Jim is a long-time associate, fellow free-market space advocate, and (I hope) friend. I didn’t want to get into the weeds of a debate on the subject at the event, particularly because he didn’t put forth any new arguments — his statement was simply a reiteration of the argument that I had already refuted in the paper itself. But briefly, like other critics, he cites the combination of Articles II and VI of the Outer Space Treaty to debunk the potential loophole that I postulate in the Issue Analysis:

The negotiators of the Outer Space Treaty (OST) knew that such [property rights] claims would never stop unless the countries agreed once and for all, that:

Outer space, including the [M]oon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other
means.

Article II of the OST couldn’t make it any clearer.

But wait, Rand and others argue that Article II of the OST only prohibits national appropriation, so individuals are free to do whatever they want in space. Well, not so fast. Article VI of the OST states:

States Parties to the Treaty shall bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space, including the [M]oon and other celestial bodies, whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or by nongovernmental entities, and for assuring that national activities are carried out in conformity with the provisions set forth in the present Treaty.

Since launching states are required to ensure that their nationals conduct their activities in conformity with the provisions of the OST, and the OST denies states the ability to appropriate celestial bodies through use, occupation, or by any other means, there is no way that the United States could directly recognize land claims in outer space that were made based on use and occupation, as the legislation Rand proposes would do. The “loophole,” as Rand calls it, simply doesn’t exist.

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Initial Media Reactions to CEI’s Space Property Rights Paper

by Rand Simberg on April 6, 2012

in International, Legal, Space

On Monday, CEI published an Issue Analysis on a possible new approach to establishing private real estate off planet under the existing international treaties, and yesterday, we held a press briefing on the Hill. There has been no reaction to the latter yet (some photos of the event can be found here), but there has been some coverage of the issue itself, some better than others.

On Tuesday, the Daily Caller had a story on it. It also included some always-useful commentary on the ongoing bipartisan porkfest that the NASA budget has become. Over at the Space Politics site, there is a lot of discussion of it, as is the case at NASASpaceFlight.com and my own blog. In all three cases much of the discussion is by people who have clearly not read the proposal, but for some reason don’t let that slow them down from weighing in with their opinions on it. What has Al Gore’s Internet come to (yes, that was sarcasm)?

Yesterday, there was a reasonable story on it at Wired (for which I and space-lawyer Michael Listner were interviewed. But the most amusing story so far has been the one based on the Wired piece, telephone-game style, with the hilariously (in the inimical style of the publication) hyperbolic headline at the Daily Mail: “Billionaires should be allowed to BUY up planets and rip up an out-of-date space treaty, claims expert.”

Well, that’s not exactly what I claimed.

Live Streaming at 11:00 AM EDT — Securing Property Rights in Space

by Ryan Radia on April 5, 2012

in Economy, Features, Property Rights, Regulation, Space, Zeitgeist

Securing Property Rights in Space

On Thursday, April 5, the Competitive Enterprise Institute will host a Capitol Hill briefing to introduce a new study by Adjunct Scholar Rand Simberg: Homesteading the Final Frontier: A Practical Proposal for Securing Property Rights in Space.

The right to claim, develop, and trade property and particularly real estate has been the driving force of human exploration throughout history. Currently, this right does not exist off planet, and its absence is discouraging real investment in space development. Rand Simberg argues that the U.S. should recognize off-planet land claims by private groups and individuals under certain conditions. The proposed Space Homesteading Act outlines appropriate conditions, including mandates that claimants offer land for sale and ensure commercial space transportation to settlements.

Some scholars argue that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the 1979 Moon Treaty preclude any nation from recognizing private property claims in space. Simberg responds to these arguments in detail and makes his case for why the Outer Space Treaty does not in fact outlaw private property claims and why the U.S. should repudiate the Moon Treaty, to which it is not a signatory.

Rand Simberg will present his study and answer audience questions at Thursday’s Capitol Hill briefing. Also speaking at the briefing will be Iain Murray, Vice President for Strategy at CEI, and James E. Dunstan, Senior Adjunct Fellow at TechFreedom and an attorney specializing in space issues.


Streaming Live by Ustream

More Space Socialism From Republicans

by Rand Simberg on March 23, 2012 · 2 comments

in Space, Trade

Over at the Beyond the Black blog, Bob Zimmerman does what I haven’t had time to yet –he excoriates the chairman of the House space appropriations subcomittee and Senator Hutchison after hearings this week:

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) asked NASA Administrator Charles Bolden during a March 21 hearing on the agency’s 2013 budget the same question he asked of the White House’s chief science adviser last month: would NASA’s partnership with commercial companies to develop astronaut transports be cheaper if the companies competing for NASA funds combined their efforts into a single “all for one and one for all” project?

Similarly, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) made the same stupid argument in her continuing effort to keep the funding of the Space Launch System, the rocket-formerly-called-Constellation, as high as possible, at the cost of cutting everything else in NASA if necessary.

If you needed any evidence that members of Congress are ignorant idiots, you only need read the comments of these elected officials at these hearings to get your proof. Wolf or Hutchison as well as several others from both parties very clearly haven’t the slightest idea what these various space companies are building. Nor do they have the faintest notion of the difficulties entailed in building these manned space vessels.

First of all, the rockets and capsules being built by all of the commercial companies are fundamentally different from each other. Dream Chaser is a space plane like the shuttle. Boeing’s CST-100 and SpaceX’s Dragon are capsules more like Apollo, though neither is much like the other. And Orbital Sciences’ Cygnus capsule is not even designed to carry humans, just cargo. It can’t return to Earth.

So, how the hell does Frank Wolf imagine it would save anyone any money to combine the efforts of these companies? The only way he could even make this suggestion is if he has never even glanced at any news story anywhere, describing these rockets and capsules.

Hutchison is even more shameful. She has become the queen of heavy-lift, not because it will get the U.S. manned program back into space (which it will not), but because it brings jobs and pork to her state. And she has been willing to let the budgets of any other NASA program die in her effort to further that pork.

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Good News/Bad News On Human Spaceflight Regulation

by Rand Simberg on February 9, 2012 · 2 comments

in Features, Regulation, Space

Post image for Good News/Bad News On Human Spaceflight Regulation

In a bill passed last week authorizing the Federal Aviation Administration for another year, the moratorium on regulation of the safety of spaceflight participants, in place since 2004, was extended for another three years, but not as long as proponents in industry had hoped:

Section 827 of the bill (on page 318), tucked away in the “Miscellaneous” section of the bill between sections on air passenger screening privacy and air transportation of lithium batteries, extends the current restriction on safety regulations, but only to October 1, 2015. The joint statement of managers of the conference report provides a few more details, on page 152 of the PDF document: “Nothing in this provision is intended to prohibit the FAA and industry stakeholders from entering into discussions intended to prepare the FAA for its role in appropriately regulating the commercial space flight industry when this provision expires.”

The current moratorium, which was due to expire at the end of this calendar year, was put in place by the 2004 Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act, which prohibited the FAA from regulating passenger safety for a period of eight years (its ability to license launches for the protection of uninvolved third parties was not affected). The idea was that the technology was insufficiently well understood by anyone, including the putative regulators, to put in place regulations that wouldn’t stifle industry development and innovation, given all the different approaches (vertical takeoff and landing, horizontal takeoff and landing, air launch, hybrid rockets, liquid rockets, etc.). The model proposed instead was on the basis of informed consent, in which participants would be given all information available on the design and operations of the vehicle, and make their own assessment of the risk, and whether or not it was worth it.

The problem was that everyone had envisioned more rapid progress, but in the seven years since, not a single commercial passenger flight has occurred, due to development problems with Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipTwo propulsion, and the financial crisis starving some of the other fledgling companies of funds needed for development. Accordingly, the industry had been pushing for Congress to extend the moratorium for another eight years to gather more needed experience to intelligently inform regulations, except this time the clock wouldn’t start when the bill passed, but rather when the first commercial passenger spaceflight occurred, to prevent the problem that arose from the first bill.

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