Space

On the ninth anniversary of the loss of the Columbia space shuttle, I have some thoughts on what’s happened since, over at PJMedia:

The problem was that after the ISS was complete, without the Shuttle, the U.S. would have no capability to reach it, and there would be a “gap” in capability until some sort of replacement was developed. At the time of the announcement, the “Crew Exploration Vehicle” (CEV) was the proposed means, but it wasn’t expected to be ready until 2014, resulting in a “gap” of at least three years, and probably longer. When Mike Griffin replaced Sean O’Keefe in 2005, he rolled out a concept called Constellation, which included the CEV, renamed at that time Orion. It also included a new rocket for it, that had not been anticipated in the original Bush plan, called Ares I, despite the fact that existing rockets, such as the Atlas V or Delta IV, could have done the job. Griffin even originally claimed that his plan would reduce the gap, being ready by 2011.

Unfortunately, the design chosen was flawed, and ran into technical difficulties immediately, increasing its costs and stretching its schedule. Because there had not originally been plans for a new launcher, there wasn’t sufficient budget to support it, and other budgets, in science and technology, and the hardware actually needed to get back to the moon, were raided to feed the rocket disaster. The schedule was slipping more than a year per year, and by 2009, when the Augustine Committee was convened to evaluate the situation, it moved rightward to 2017, with only a low probability of hitting that operational date.

Meanwhile, we are totally dependent on the Russians for both transportation to and from the ISS, and for emergency lifeboat services, for which (unsurprisingly) they have been increasing the cost since the Shuttle was belatedly retired last summer, and shipping taxpayer funds overseas to them. Worse, each time we give them a new contract, we have to waive the Iran North-Korea Syria Non-Proliferation Act which prohibits trade with countries who aid those nations in the development of missiles and nukes, because Russia continues to help Iran with both.

Worse yet, while they have been flying for decades, their space systems have proven unreliable just at the point at which we have attained such total dependence. Last summer and fall, they had multiple launch failures, and then a failed Mars probe in November, which recently entered the atmosphere with a load of toxic propellants, but fortunately seems to have fallen into the ocean. And now, they’ve delayed their next ISS flight because they have leaks in the pressurized Soyuz crew module.

And Congress continues to underfund the only solution that can provide us with multiple competitive companies, and eliminate our reliance on thee Russians — Commercial Crew — while demanding that NASA waste billions on an unneeded giant rocket with no funded mission that will probably never fly, but provides jobs in the right states and districts. Next year, it will be a decade, and the low-information level of the space-policy debate of the last few days in Florida would indicate that it’s unlikely to get better any time soon.

Over at PJMedia, I discuss the technical, economic and political feasibility of what Newt proposes. But as I note there, the hardest part is the politics:

It would be a tough sell to a Congress that is used to directing space funds to its campaign contributors — a prize wouldn’t give them an adequate amount of control over where the money ended up. And even if a President Gingrich could get the support of Congress to establish such a prize, there would be no guarantee that a future Congress wouldn’t rescind it, creating a great deal of uncertainty and risk for someone who wanted to pursue it. A private prize can escrow the funds, but there’s no sure-fire way for a fickle U.S. government to do so, particularly in times of trillion-dollar deficits, because the Constitution doesn’t allow a Congress to commit a future Congress to an expenditure. A prize fund would always be at risk of being raided for some more “worthy” social objective.

But there’s another problem. When Speaker Gingrich proposes that the settlement eventually become a U.S. state, he is implicitly advocating withdrawal from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which explicitly prohibits claims of national sovereignty off planet. The treaty can be withdrawn from with one year’s notice (and in fact Bob Bigelow has been warning over the past year that the Chinese intend to do exactly that), but getting the State Department and Senate to go along with abandoning a long-standing treaty that we helped negotiate, and which performs a lot of other vital functions, may be a non-starter politically. Better perhaps would be the approach of the Space Settlement Institute, which proposes to have the U.S. recognize private claims of non-state actors, which could accomplish the goal of allowing property on the moon without the need to withdraw from the OST. It would also provide a tradable market in lunar real estate, allowing private settlement ventures to raise funds without the need for taxpayer money. It wouldn’t be a U.S. state, but it might be a settlement of Americans, with American values, which is probably what the former speaker’s goal is.

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The United Launch Alliance just got an Air Force launch contract for 159 launches, which I guess means that they didn’t get the 40-launch block buy they were hoping for, and that SpaceX (and the General Accountability Office) has been fighting. The price? FifteenOne and a half billion bucks.

It doesn’t take advanced mathematics to come up with a number of over a billion and a halfhundred fifty million dollars per flight.

Their problem is a classic one of the launch industry — fixed costs too high, and flight rate too low, resulting in high cost per flight, which in turn makes it harder to get more business to increase the flight rate to bring down their prices, particularly when they have a disruptive competitor (SpaceX) who is rewriting the rules of the game. The only thing keeping them alive is that, for now, they have a monopoly sustained by the government because it can’t afford to lose the capability for satellite delivery, but if Falcon Heavy becomes reality, and builds up a reliability record, at a price of $120 million a flight ULA will be in a world of hurt. They aren’t helped by the fact that Congress refuses to consider allowing NASA to use them for its human exploration activities, instead insisting that the agency build its own ridiculously large rocket for which no one else will have a use, or be able to afford (assuming that the program actually survives to an operations phase).

They have two options: continue to lobby the government to subsidize them, or to use some of the money they’re getting for this purchase to invest in reducing their costs to compete. Presumably, as one example, that’s why they’ve been working with XCOR to develop a replacement for the RL-10 upper-stage engine (which if they succeed will in turn put a lot of pressure on another high-cost aerospace company, Pratt & Whitney-Rocketdyne). But ultimately, real competition is the only way that we’re going to reduce the costs to the levels we need to do useful things in space.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, it’s nowhere near as bad as I thought. The original story had misplaced the decimal point — it’s actually $1.5 billion, so that’s more like a $170 million a launch (a number that’s much more reasonable, but will still be uncompetitive with Falcon Heavy if the Air Force develops confidence in it. And even at an order of magnitude less, my point still stands.

There has been a great deal of concern over the past few months among the potential providers of crew services to NASA over their stated plans to shift the efforts of the Commercial Crew Program from successful Space Act Agreements, that had been so successful in the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, to a more traditional procurement approach. Under the Space Act Agreements, the providers had the flexibility to come up with their own solutions without a lot of NASA oversight, and were only paid when they actually achieved the specified milestones, reducing risk for the taxpayer. However, NASA was concerned that this approach wouldn’t provide them with sufficient assurance that they would get systems designed to meet their exacting safety and mission-success requirements for transport of astronauts to the International Space Station, and they had accordingly decided to move to a standard (though still fixed price) contract under the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) for the next phase of the program. Many in the industry objected, fearing that this would increase both development and operational costs not only for NASA flights, but commercial ones as well. In fact, Elon Musk, CEO and founder of one of the leading potential providers, went so far as to threaten to withdraw from the program if NASA pressed forward with the change. Nonetheless, NASA had announced that it would be issuing a Request For Proposal (RFP) on Monday under the new procurement rules for the program, with planned selection and awards next summer.

Well, Mr. Musk won’t have to make good on his threat for now. This morning, Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Operations, announced in a press conference that that the RFP wouldn’t be released on Monday, and that the agency has decided to stick with the Space Act Agreements for the next phase of the program, for almost the next two years. In response to questions from the press, he said that NASA hadn’t changed its mind as a result of industry pressure, but rather because they hadn’t gotten as much funding as they had anticipated when making their original procurement plans earlier in the year. NASA had requested $850 million for the program for 2012, but in its “minibus” appropriations bill last month, Congress gave the agency less than half of that, only $406 million. Gerstenmaier, of course, made sure to thank Congress for what it had provided, noting that it was more than they had ever had for the program, and that earlier versions of the bill had less (in one case, zero).

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