What's With All The Commercial Space News?
Keith’s note: A lot of people in the private space sector are annoyed (some are angry) with the Trump folks since they directed NASA to look into the government side (crew on SLS EM-1 flight) of a proposed government/commercial return to the Moon. Then the “Commercial” Spaceflight Federation sold its soul and jumped on board to support SLS. There was a handshake sort of deal in place between the Alabama mafia and the commercial space folks. Apparently that deal fell through.
Suddenly Elon Musk announces his trip to the Moon. Then Virgin Galactic reveals a major restructuring and expansion of its launch plans. Then Robert Bigelow starts talking about his lunar plans. And then someone at Jeff Bezo’s Blue Origin leaks something to Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post about Jeff Bezos’ new Amazon-delivery-to-the-Moon service. Was all of this done (in part) out of annoyance with Trump’s people (probably just a little) – or is this finally the break-out in commercial space that so many people have been hoping for?
Regardless of the motivation(s) or timing, a lot of very interesting and important things just happened in commercial space. Too bad their trade group, CSF, has sold out to the Dark Side.
Or perhaps there’s hinting from the gov that NASA’s role will be decreased and some money made available for commercial moon missions.
Making more money available for “commercial” moon missions is just a euphemism for laundering tax dollars into private companies through NASA. No thanks. NASA needs reform, but “commercial” space throws the baby (public ownership of taxpayer funded research) out with the bathwater (bureaucracy).
Aside from developmental dollars, mostly spent, SpaceX is simply a vendor. They are paying their own way.
How about a less absurd explanation – one of the “commercial space” companies was so convinced that Trump would kill SLS and Orion that they are now trying desperately to subvert them before the President’s budget comes out?
Bezos doesn’t take money from NASA and his delivery service could actually support an SLS/Orion centric lunar architecture as could Bigelow’s. Meanwhile, most of CSF’s membership isn’t trying to compete with SLS and Orion – they are doing other things (like Virgin launching small payloads to LEO) so saying the organization “sold out” by endorsing SLS/Orion is nonsense. What is really happening is that SpaceX wants to undermine SLS and Orion so they can get NASA to fund Musk’s Falcon Heavy and Dragon centric exploration vision. They will claim its “commercial” but its mostly just redirecting government money to go to Musk and true BLUE California instead of NASA’s primes and Trump states like Alabama.
Blue Origin took NASA money before.
Yes Blue Origin was awarded a few millions to develop some specific safety hardware but they have not been a major competitor for government money unlike SpaceX; meanwhile, as Bezos says in the article you pasted:
“I’m excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA”
Bezos investing HIS money to develop a commercial cargo service to support a government funded lunar base would be a real commercial market partnership with NASA. SpaceX getting funded by NASA to turn Dragon 2 into a deep space vehicle – or develop a new vehicle – and develop Falcon Heavy upgrades is just doing government work and calling it commercial.
Nobody paid a dime to SpaceX for the development of Falcon Heavy.
“Bezos investing HIS money to develop a commercial cargo service to support a government funded lunar base would be a real commercial market partnership with NASA. “
Yes I agree, but it would still require a NASA upfront commitment before he does.
I would like to see NASA drop the SLS orion and use that funding for a habitat in both EML1 0r 2 and or lunar orbit and on the ground
BUT
Rather then NASA developing anything. Just agree to be an anchor tenant at each station. Then just put NASA reseachers at different facilities. Commercial should beable to service cargo and passenger services.
NASA will just mess it up. You need a Comsat style corporation focused on lunar industrialization to make it work.
Just out of curiosity, why L1 or L2? They are unstable orbits and require constant station keeping.
Because you can do a tiny circle at those spots and have low station keeping costs
“The Lagrange points L1, L2 and L3 would not appear to be so useful because they are unstable equilibrium points. Like balancing a pencil on its point, keeping a satellite there is theoretically possible, but any perturbing influence will drive it out of equilibrium. However, in practice these Lagrange points have proven to be very useful indeed since a spacecraft can be made to execute a small orbit about one of these Lagrange points with a very small expenditure of energy. They have provided useful places to “park” a spacecraft for observations. These orbits around L1 and L2 are often called “halo orbits”. L3 is on the opposite side of the Earth from the Moon, so is not so easy to use.”
http://hyperphysics.phy-ast…
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Most of the advantages I’ve seen are pretty specialized. Sun-Earth L1 halo orbits are used by solar wind monitors, but that’s because they need to stay more-or-less directly sunward of the Earth. JWST will use a Sun-Earth L2 halo orbit, but that’s because they want the sunshade to also serve as an Earth shade. But station keeping fuel limits JWST’s lifetime to ten years. The Earth-Moon L2 halo has been proposed for a lunar farside communication relay, but, again, mostly for a lack of alternatives. If you just want a habitat or way station near the Moon, it isn’t obvious a high lunar orbit wouldn’t be better. The L1/L2 station keeping requirements can become significant unless the maneuvers are relatively frequently, and that can become an operational pain.
You will be hard pressed to find a better staging point than L2 when you consider all the destinations, but it all starts with LEO staging to reduce the LV size to 10 to 20 mT.
http://ccar.colorado.edu/as…
This is absurd. Bezos hasn’t invested anything yet, he is “ready” to invest. Meanwhile SpaceX has invested significant mount of their own money on FH, which is entirely self funded, how is this not commercial?
And SpaceX is not asking any money from NASA to turn Dragon 2 into deep space vehicle, they’re already working on this using their own money on Red Dragon, this new lunar tourism scheme is also self funded (or funded by deposit from their customer), how is this not commercial?
The whole idea of Dragon 2 + FH to replace SLS/Orion is non-sense, that’s not how SpaceX is planning things, they don’t need any government money for Dragon 2/FH except those already promised under Commercial Crew.
Blue Origin is not talking about going it alone,
“At an Aviation Week awards ceremony Thursday evening, Bezos added that the moon could help propel humans even further into space, to destinations such as Mars: “I think that if you go to the moon first, and make the moon your home, then you can get to Mars more easily.”
After remaining quiet and obsessively secretive for years, Blue Origin’s attempt to partner with NASA is a huge coming out of sorts for the company, which has been funded almost exclusively by Bezos. The paper urges NASA to develop a program that provides “incentives to the private sector to demonstrate a commercial lunar cargo delivery service.”
Blue Origin could perform the first lunar mission as early as July 2020, Bezos wrote, but stressed that it could “only be done in partnership with NASA. Our liquid hydrogen expertise and experience with precision vertical landing offer the fastest path to a lunar lander mission. I’m excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen.””
https://www.washingtonpost….
Interesting that he talked about “settlement” of the Moon. I could have sworn that Bezos was skeptical of off-world settlement in one of the interviews I read about him months ago, saying the Earth was vastly more hospitable than any other planet in the solar system (although he supports space habitats).
Here we go again with “settlement”.
I’m sure Mr. Bezos, and other smart people, have thought about the nature and consistency of people living on the moon. And I’m sure they are smart enough to differentiate between “settlement” and “scientific outpost”.
Nobody talks much though about what sort of activities occupy these “settlers”.
They will do what settlers do, and scientists hate, find creative ways to exploit the environment to make money. Scientists have hoarded space policy and space long enough, it is time to give it to the rest of America by turning the American entrepreneurs loose 🙂
Who knows? Maybe someone will take a page from Sam Gunn and team with the Syndicate to turn Hell Crater into a vacation resort that lives up to its name. 🙂
I missed something. Where is Hell (the one off Earth, I know about the town in the US.) And why didn’t the IAU insist on the ethnically/mythologically correct spelling, with a single “l”?
You must be thinking about the Norse Goddess, the daughter of Loki. On the Moon craters are named after famous scientists.
Hell Crater is named after Maximilian Hell, a Jesuit Priest who founded the Vienna Observatory. It is located on the Deslandres Plains in the Southern Lunar Highlands.
It’s a young crater, estimated to be about 108 million years old based on its appearance.
I see we share a love of detective novels.
But respectfully they will not do what settlers “do”: they won’t live off the land; they won’t exploit resources, depending on cheap transportation. They will simply be an on-going logistical responsibility that will make ISS seem like.a bargain.
I’m in favor of a lunar outpost, by the way. But have no delusions. It’s not the start of a new democracy. Or whatever. It is not the New World.
I think you are confusing Sam Gunn with Peter Gunn. Sam Gunn is an astronaut, not a detective.
It depends. If you approach it like a science outpost a science outpost is all it will ever be like the ISS. Its why space firms need to move beyond the NASA mind frame.
“beyond the NASA mind frame”
That’s what we’re discussing, isn’t it? All I ever hear is the sense that if we would just get to the moon or Mars then, well, the good old free market would take hold. People would find a way! Heck, you’d be surprised just how smart people are! Build it and they will come!
But nothing more than that. Nothing more than the notion that something will turn up, that people have always found a way. Or other hopefulness. No real solid plan of how to turn Luna/ Mars into a human settlement. No serious discussion of the fundamental issues of transportation and raw materials.
Maybe Mr. Musk has cracked the case; dunno. Maybe he knows how to solve the supply line problem with home grown tomatoes or some such, or a way to turn perchlorate into loam (alchemy would be required). Maybe he knows how to move goods cheaply from one gravity well to the next. Maybe he’s OK living a century buried underground while Mars becomes self-sustaining, if it ever does. Maybe he knows how to fund the $mega-trillions required to replicate the Earthside infrastructure so necessary to modern life.
But so far it looks an awful lot like a pyramid scheme (though admittedly very little is actually known).
So what exactly IS “beyond the NASA mindset”?
Something strange occurred to me. What would you think about the following sort of settlement or community? A place with an insanely high cost of living, with about 75% of the jobs in one sort of service industry or another (or in field which don’t require raw materials, e.g. computer programming.) Less than 1% of the population work in any sort of manufacturing, and tourism is a major source of income. Would you consider that an economically viable community? That’s a trick question, because I have just described San Francisco. I know that isn’t what it was like in the past, or why it was established or grew. But it does exist, and many people choose to live there, despite the huge cost of living, simply because they like the place and it’s culture.
Very tricky Dr. Crary. Very tricky indeed.
But even from the beginning SF had cheap transportation – even around the Horn from whence, I should point out, they could obtain finished goods in return for the local largesse.
I take your point that people could find employment in activities not available to the early west coast, and that radio waves are some sort of stand-in for clipper ships.
I’ve not seen any sort of in-depth thinking about the nature and evolution offered by off-planet settlements among the anthropologists or the cultural geographers (and admittedly not searched much beyond google scholar).
Perhaps nothing useful is to be found studying the patterns of human settlement experienced by the stone age middle east, or mercantile age North America, or Exploration Age South and Meso-America. Perhaps we will collectively construct the enormous infrastructure analogous to SF and do it at collective cost. Or perhaps we will find on Luna something, anything, of sufficient value that it can be exchanged for blankets and weapons from Mother Earth.
Or perhaps, as you propose, the exchange will be initiated by brain power. Hard to see though how offering services from Luna City makes one more competitive than services offered from Kansas City.
As to tourism – that’s the strength and weakness of the argument. Weak because the enormous costs self-limit the customer pool.
And strong because so much of the argument nowadays is informed by the supposition that the tourist market actually exists.
Good point. I envision a rotating crew like we see on the ISS. Their jobs will be to maintain the machines that extract, process and ship out the resources that will make their companies a profit. The settlement(s) will grow organically as the smart people find new niches to profit from.
What sort of resources will be extracted?
And ignoring for the moment and for the sake of simplicity the fact that we have no idea how to mine, smelt, or otherwise add value to whatever is on the moon – what would the product be used for? How do they create value unless used locally?
The regolith is in a reduced environment chemically. It consists largely of oxygen and silicon, with some aluminum and a bit of iron in low concentrations. These samples come from Apollo but of course like on earth concentrations of desirable minerals are likely scattered around.
But even so as I’ve said elsewhere we do no know how to process raw materials on the moon.
On this point Mr. Bezos is quite correct. It’s a point I’ve made many times. The true wealth of the solar system is in the asteroids.
Our work at this point is developing the enabling technologies that will support heavy construction in deep space.
Michael…you make a great case for not going to the Moon. But you know what? People are going to the Moon. And this is this is the difference between a scholar and a businessman. While the scholar is busy expounding on how you can’t make a profit…the businessman will be busy figuring out how to make a profit.
Really? We will go to the moon again and it will be just like Apollo.
I have yet to hear one believable business-based notion involving the moon. Not one. Have you?Any notion at all that jump starts a human settlement on Luna? That is exactly why all of the New Space startups never mention how great it would be to operate on Luna. Lots of smart (and avaricious) people around. Not one single idea.
What is the point of going if that question can’t be answered?
Michael…I never said “just like Apollo”. I don’t know where you got that. Also, I’m not a business man…but Bob Bigelow is a very successful one…and he sees a business case for going to the moon. I suspect that the initial markets will be servicing government research and private tourism. Just look to SpaceX to see this business model emerging.
“just like Apollo” is my phrase, but it’s not very accurate. In the case of Mr. Bigelow – he plans tourist hotels. This is great! I want to go.
The point I’m making, that everyone is no doubt hearing, is that a lunar hotel or research station is not a settlement. It’s not a future town. It won’t ever need a separate constitution. Or be independent. Think Antarctica.
Michael…if you’ll refer back to my original statement…I compared the moon to the ISS, with a rotating crew. How you conjured up Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower Compact out of that is a mystery to me. Our difference is that I speculate that there will probably be resource extraction as part of a larger cislunar economy. You speculate that there won’t be. I’m good with that.
Exactly the opposite.
“Jeff Bezos thinks we need to build industrial zones in space in order to save Earth”
“”Let me assure you, this is the best planet. We need to protect it, and the way we will is by going out into space,” he told Recode Editor at large Walt Mossberg. “You don’t want to live in a retrograde world where we have to freeze population growth.”
Bezos says tasks that require lots of energy shouldn’t be handled on Earth. Instead, we should perform them in space, and that will happen within the next few hundred years.
“Energy is limited here. In at least a few hundred years … all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet,” Bezos added. “Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial. You shouldn’t be doing heavy energy on earth. We can build gigantic chip factories in space.”
Solar energy, for instance, is more practical for factories in space, he said.
“We don’t have to actually build them here,” he said. “The Earth shades itself, [whereas] in space you can get solar power 24/7. … The problem with other planets … people will visit Mars, and we will settle Mars, and people should because it’s cool, but for heavy industry, I would actually put it in space.”
No word yet, however, on when Bezos plans to move Amazon fulfillment warehouses beyond the surly bonds of Earth.”
http://www.recode.net/2016/…
Mr. Bezos’ prosaic vision doesn’t tell us how exactly “heavy” objects are to be moved from space to planet-side. He doesn’t tell us that because he knows the answer, and to state the answer is a bridge too far for the public and the press: that the product of heavy construction will be used in situ. That we will be living, as KSR describes, in habitats of one sort or another, all dependent on the output from asteroid-based factories.
It’s a big leap but about the only logical one.
Not only is “commercial space” a ruse to funnel tax dollars to a different congressional districts, it is a complete give-away of tax dollars to billionaires. Seriously, how is it that NASA pays for so much of Dragon development but doesn’t maintain any ownership? And don’t say “NASA is just buying seats.” If an airplane ticket were so expensive as to fund design and development of an airplane, a reasonable consumer would _demand_ ownership in the plane and the IP behind it as well. (See, basically, the funding arrangements of any VC-funded startup.) That this isn’t the case with “commercial space” shows just how disgustingly corrupt the whole arrangement is. Now make no mistake: NASA needs reform, but starving NASA by transferring chunks of it’s budget to private corporations is not the way to do it. Seriously, von Braun worked on a civil servant salary—why shouldn’t Musk!
If you ask an engineering company to produce a bespoke part for you, they will charge you for the design and tooling, long before any parts are actually produced. And you won’t own any of the IP that they create, that you didn’t own before the deal. If you want to own the IP, you have to pay a lot more.
It’s standard business practice. It’s also standard NASA practice.
For example, NASA doesn’t own the IP to most of its probes, the Mars rovers, etc. It can’t take the design of an existing probe or rover to an open call for bids to produce five more, because it doesn’t own the design, the contractor does. (Usually Lockheed Martin.)
Likewise, the designs for SLS/Orion belong to the contractors, Boeing, Lockheed, O-ATK. In spite of spending more than a hundred billion dollars over the Shuttle program, then Constellation, and now SLS/Orion, NASA doesn’t own the IP.
As to cost: The entire Commercial Crew program, for it’s entire history, costs less than a single year of SLS/Orion development. So NASA’s not paying that much for two entire separate commercial launch systems.
[Aside: Lockheed Martin gets 98% of its funding for the US government. Shouldn’t you just bite the bullet and declare it a government department?]
“Likewise, the designs for SLS/Orion belong to the contractors, Boeing, Lockheed, O-ATK. In spite of spending more than a hundred billion dollars over the Shuttle program, then Constellation, and now SLS/Orion, NASA doesn’t own the IP.”
The taxpayer owns the vehicles. They are also delivered with source code and drawings. NASA can change a prime contractor without ending the project, and, indeed, it has done this before. The system isn’t perfect, but there’s at least something to prevent companies from having untenable leverage over NASA. This is not the case with SpaceX.
“As to cost: The entire Commercial Crew program, for it’s entire history, costs less than a single year of SLS/Orion development. So NASA’s not paying that much for two entire separate commercial launch systems.”
Its great that SpaceX can do what they do with such few dollars. It’s a shame we didn’t reform NASA so they could do the same. In other words, instead of SpaceX or SLS/Orion, why not the third and best option: an agile and efficient NASA like we had in the 60s?
Because every time we try to change something, people like you defend the old methods. See the entire rest of your comment and most of your comment history.
Oh noes, NASA is doing something differently, defend the castle!
“Oh noes, NASA is doing something differently, defend the castle!”
If the new approach has flaws they should be pointed out.
“Because every time we try to change something, people like you defend the old methods.”
My comments explicitly state NASA should be reformed. You are misrepresenting my views.
Has any large, government agency ever been reformed in any significant way? The only American example I can think of is the military, but then only after a disastrous start in wars and under real pressure to avoid loosing.
“why not the third and best option: an agile and efficient NASA like we had in the 60s?”
That’s the theme of this blog in a nutshell.
Except for the part where commercial cargo and commercial crew are costing the taxpayer far less than what the NASA cost models would predict for a typical NASA run program. It’s on the order of 10x cheaper! That’s not insignificant. It saves the taxpayers money over doing things the “traditional” way.
Part of the reason for this is that both “commercial” programs have at least two providers. Competition is a *good thing* which is completely absent from traditional NASA programs.
There is a difference in culture at the NewSpace Companies that I think provides a nice balance to the more stable large aerospace companies. Just remember, what goes around comes around. If the NewSpace people call for cancellation of these big space projects, and any of them do get cancelled, then a lot of people will be out of jobs, and they won’t be thinking very kindly of the NewSpace people. Under a different administration, the shoe may be on the other foot, and it may be NewSpace funding that’s getting cut. I think, going forward, that we must constantly be focusing not only on the development costs of projects, but also the ongoing costs of missions using the big-space technologies. The good thing about NewSpace companies is that they aren’t too big to fail. Larger companies’ big-space projects seem to always consume enormous portions of the NASA budget, yet they employ so many people that it’s a huge political issue to cancel a project. The larger aerospace companies must somehow bring a more entrepreneurial and lean mindset into their culture if we want to keep mission costs reasonable.
It’s called “jockeying”. Just make sure the extraneous media spells your name correctly.
Beats me. Maybe Trump hinted that more money would be forthcoming for commercial space in some of those quiet advisory meetings?
It surprised me that the soul of CSF actually worth anything and can be traded.
Guys.
NOBODY PAYS ATTENTION to this little corner of the world. People here obsess: will SLS be killed, or not, if so why not, or oh god I hope not.
Nobody. Cares.
Nobody in the WH gives a shit about SLS. Or even knows it exists. Or knows anything more about NASA than my next door neighbor, which is nothing. Nothing at all.
Trying to read the tea leaves at the bottom of the tea pot is nuts. They drink coffee.
You are both right and wrong. I doubt anyone in the White House knows or cares much about spaceflight. But Musk and Bezo do. Presumably the two people planning on a lunar flyby care enough to pay a hefty down payment. Trying to read space-related motives into the President’s actions is pointless. Puzzling out the space-related motives of someone like Mr. Bezo is not.
For the most part you’re right. Do you remember that great space announcement President Bush planned for the Wright Bros. 100 year anniversary in Dec 2003?
Yep, it never happened. It was delayed until the next month without much fanfare. 14 years later it’s a distant(oort cloud distant) memory.
When you have a new king everyone wants to get his attention 🙂