I wonder if the various old space Senators will respond by delaying Rep. Bridenstine’s confirmation hearing to send a message that NASA’s future in space is in Alabama & Florida, not with Mojave’s New Spacers.
The Senators have their old favorites, but a couple of the new companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin, are in Florida. The southeastern coast remains the most practical site for orbital launch, although eastern Puerto Rico has some potential sites also, including the former Rooseveldt Roads naval station.
Or possibly if their turn-around time is longer than their current claims. If they need a couple weeks of time on pad per launch, they’ll need more than three pads.
You are still thinking in terms old space. A few huge spaceports as access points to orbit.
One of the implications of BFR point to point is that those same point to point space fields by the big cities could also be used to send payloads to the Moon, Mars and beyond.
Another is that instead of building satellites and payloads on the ground and shipping them to spaceports is that the components will be sent to orbital habitats and assembled there. The rocket that took you to Tokyo this morning could be carrying passengers to Glenn City in LEO on its next flight š
And, in principal, OSC could launch a Pegasus from any airport with 10,000 feet of runway. But they don’t. Nor do airlines fly wide body aircraft out every airport which could handle them. There is a certain amount of logistical efficiency that come from having hubs. For satellites and BFR, I suspect there will always be some pre-launch preparation and checkout of the payload. It probably wouldn’t make sense to have those facilities at every site on a global point-to-point BFR transport network.
Boca Chica also doesn’t strike me as an obvious choice for a point-to-point hub. Then again, neither did Guam until I found out that United uses it as a hub.
In principle yes, but it also needs to launch over the ocean because it drops so much hardware while heading to orbit. And they need tracking for it. So it flys from only a few locations.
The locations that handle wide-body aircraft are determined more by traffic than anything else. That is why the number of locations are limited. The same will be true of BFR. So one could see satellites going into orbit from locations off of Los Angeles or Baltimore/Washington near where they are manufactured, but not from New York City or Miami where they are not.
But surely the incremental costs associated with transporting a satellite from manufacturer to the launch site is small, a fact that favors the continued use and expansion of facilities already in place?
I think the existence of hubs for orbital launches is likely, but I’m not sure where they would be. Currently, the cost of shipping a spacecraft from the manufacturer’s location to the launch site is relatively small. Huge, compared to most people’s pay checks, but small compared to the overall cost of the satellite and launch. That’s how people can build them in places like Denver and Toulouse. So proximity to the manufacturer may not drive the choice of a launch hub.
But we are talking about radical changes. If all the promises of BFR pan out, people might start flying very cheap, COTS satellites (since the launch costs are so low) and factory-to-launch-hub transportation might become a significant cost. This is all getting very hypothetical and murky. It’s almost as bad as someone in 1905 trying to predict Curtiss A and M’s 1920 profit margin.
You are still thinking in terms old space. A few huge spaceports as access points to orbit
Yes!
BFR is much more than simply a ‘game changer.’ And as you point out the availability of such a system requires quite a bit of re-thinking. So much of the ‘old space’ approach to human expansion depends, for instance, on way stations and on expendables. When those and other elements are no longer needed, plans for extra-LEO travel simply unravel.
SO many constraints are removed that existing or conceptual expansion plans are fully obviated.
It’s a New Age, and it needs a name. Old Space became New Space. BFR brings us something entirely new. “Our Space”?
Actions? SLS and Orion will continue (per many) and the path to BEO and ‘mooning’, ISS splashdown in ~2024; and let ‘commercial’ fend for themselves is the current plan. Elections have consequences.
Yep, and this one may finally break the log jam in space.
As soon as ISS is in the ocean NASA will be no longer in competition with private space stations. So private firms will be able to finally move forward. It will be just like commercial launch. As long as NASA was launching private satellites at MC (1962-1986) no private firm could compete with them. Once NASA was barred from doing so the private launch industry emerged,
And when its clear that SLS/Orion will not cut it, they will be “fired”. They would probably be fired already if Mr. Trump didn’t owe Senator Shelby a favor.
Not just that the companies would not compete against the shuttle. Congress actually made it, through regulations, impossible to compete. Legislation had to be passed to specifically allow it. Even today, we still do not have all the legislation in place to allow freedom of action for launching commercial passengers. Congressional space state members still has NASA in the picture for commercial passengers launches and have balked at passing the laws and regs to make an easy transfer. It was only the last President, Obama, that signed off on a person picking up a rock and being able to claim it. There still are bars on free flow of capital moving outward, but forces are slowly chipping away at it.
This observation benefits, at least in part, from hindsight. Only recently has private space been able to consider and finally achieve orbit. This ability is the direct result of decades’ experimentation, trials, and a fair amount of rapid deconstruction, chiefly as NASA lit the way forward.
The first commercial launch licenses after Challenger were for Deltas and Atlas rockets owned by old space. In the 1960’s and 1970’s the Deltas and Atlas rockets of that period put commercial payloads in space. The difference was NASA bought the rockets and then resold the flights to the commercial payloads at an government set price based in theory on MC.
NASA could have stepped out of the loop at anytime, or never even got involved, but choose to do so. If they didn’t get involved it would have created the legal environment and a market price system for commercial launch services in the 1960’s instead of after the Challenger Accident.
Get a down-arrow for inaccuracy, Tom. The ISS is not only NOT in competition with current, non-existent private space stations….it’s going to be the only reason there will be any at all. later. Without NASA’s policy to jump-start a commercial cargo industry- and coincidentally essentially saving SpaceX, and thus progress in space launch, in the process – there will be no private space stations. Without a commercial crew program, which followed – like commercial cargo, riding on the back of ISS’s needs – again, no future commercial space stations. And Bigelow, far from feeling held back, is wanting to attach even bigger modules to ISS, before going full free-flyer, as part of the overall multi-year transition.
As for the 1980s and NASA was launching private satellites ….no private firm could compete with them. Once NASA was barred from doing so the private launch industry emerged,, that’s extremely misleading. The commercial launch industry in the 80s was successfully transitioning from ELVs to commercial, from-the-shuttle-based, launches. Before Challenger, in fact, most (not some) of all major shuttle payloads, were by commercial launch companies, having developed- on their own dime- things like the PAM-A, PAM-D, TOS, and smaller commercial launch systems that flew from the shuttle. (I was the NASA lead for that process/systems in Houston). When, post-Challenger, Reagan arbitrarily kicked those majority of (commercial) payload delivery systems off of shuttle, there was, indeed, a huge winner…..Arianespace, which went to town on that decision for many, many years. In the US, no commercial ELV system successfully emerged…..not a single one. The commercial US systems that piggybacked off of the shuttle’s existence were essentially a forerunner of whatās happened using ISS: because of ISS, we will have multi-competitor commercial cargo systems, commercial crew systems; and Nanoracks, andā¦.etc.
As Mark Twain said, ātis not so amazing, the older he got, the number of things that he could remember; but, the number of things he could remember, that never really happened that way. No ISSā¦.no commercial cargo, or crew, or Nanoracks; no commercial stations. Period.
Flew from the Shuttle once in orbit, not from a commerical launch vehicle is the key term here. That is like claiming you delivered a package in a private car after a USAF C-130 flies your car a thousand miles to the local airport š
But you also skip over the ELVs NASA used to launch commercial payloads before the Shuttle at Marginal Cost. Yes, Arianespace made out well, it made out because NASA had so suppressed the American launch industry there weren’t even rules for licensing it.
Bigelow has been waiting a decade to launch his commercial station, he has the money to do so, but Boeing and SpaceX are just too busy going after the easy government dollars. His $50 million America just couldn’t compete against the hundreds of millions in tax payer dollars being used to out bid him. CCP has taken almost a decade as the firm’s move at the NASA pace to get the NASA dollars as NASA contractors, even though Dragon has been flying since 2010. Compared that to the time it took to develop the Gemini and Apollo capsules when technology when you had slide rules and drafting boards to work with.
Work always expand to fit the funding and time government contracts allow. CCP is a good example of this rule.
No private firm would want to compete with the space shuttle. NASA was selling launches of payloads on the shuttle for FAR less than the full cost. In other words, no private firm wanted to compete with the US Government, which should come as no surprise.
This is a sign of things to come. Commercial space will begin to fill roles only held by NASA and the big 3. I don’t see SLS flying more than once. It’s all up to commercial space providers to demonstrate capability over the next few years. Do that, and you will change access to orbit forever.
We see so many policy decisions being made by poorly informed ādecidersā. And this is one arena – space – where a robust āboth sidesā argument could be made.
Which leads to this question: how informed is the VP? Is a a longtime space geek? Is this a genuine effort to learn things? Does he have a sense that space policy is both a very wide and very deep river?
Iām flummoxed, really, by the decisions that must be made by folks who are truly ignorant. Itās why, in my own view, I will choose a āpolicy wonkā whenever given the opportunity. And to achieve an adequately based degree of wonkitude a person needs many years of true curiosity and contact.
Does Mr. Pence fit that description? More to the point can he accurately assess his own abilities ?
Likely not, although I do pose the question based on my own ignorance of Mr. Pence; and note that in that situation, politicians will fall back on decision modalities more fairly called personal predilection or slogans (I.e. āwe donāt want to choose sidesā).
A nod to New Space…cool.
I wonder if the various old space Senators will respond by delaying Rep. Bridenstine’s confirmation hearing to send a message that NASA’s future in space is in Alabama & Florida, not with Mojave’s New Spacers.
The Senators have their old favorites, but a couple of the new companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin, are in Florida. The southeastern coast remains the most practical site for orbital launch, although eastern Puerto Rico has some potential sites also, including the former Rooseveldt Roads naval station.
Don’t forget SpaceX going to Texas for its new launch site.
My suspicion is that Texas was just a “plan B” in case Florida did not offer a good enough deal.
Or possibly if their turn-around time is longer than their current claims. If they need a couple weeks of time on pad per launch, they’ll need more than three pads.
You are still thinking in terms old space. A few huge spaceports as access points to orbit.
One of the implications of BFR point to point is that those same point to point space fields by the big cities could also be used to send payloads to the Moon, Mars and beyond.
Another is that instead of building satellites and payloads on the ground and shipping them to spaceports is that the components will be sent to orbital habitats and assembled there. The rocket that took you to Tokyo this morning could be carrying passengers to Glenn City in LEO on its next flight š
And, in principal, OSC could launch a Pegasus from any airport with 10,000 feet of runway. But they don’t. Nor do airlines fly wide body aircraft out every airport which could handle them. There is a certain amount of logistical efficiency that come from having hubs. For satellites and BFR, I suspect there will always be some pre-launch preparation and checkout of the payload. It probably wouldn’t make sense to have those facilities at every site on a global point-to-point BFR transport network.
Boca Chica also doesn’t strike me as an obvious choice for a point-to-point hub. Then again, neither did Guam until I found out that United uses it as a hub.
In principle yes, but it also needs to launch over the ocean because it drops so much hardware while heading to orbit. And they need tracking for it. So it flys from only a few locations.
The locations that handle wide-body aircraft are determined more by traffic than anything else. That is why the number of locations are limited. The same will be true of BFR. So one could see satellites going into orbit from locations off of Los Angeles or Baltimore/Washington near where they are manufactured, but not from New York City or Miami where they are not.
But surely the incremental costs associated with transporting a satellite from manufacturer to the launch site is small, a fact that favors the continued use and expansion of facilities already in place?
I think the existence of hubs for orbital launches is likely, but I’m not sure where they would be. Currently, the cost of shipping a spacecraft from the manufacturer’s location to the launch site is relatively small. Huge, compared to most people’s pay checks, but small compared to the overall cost of the satellite and launch. That’s how people can build them in places like Denver and Toulouse. So proximity to the manufacturer may not drive the choice of a launch hub.
But we are talking about radical changes. If all the promises of BFR pan out, people might start flying very cheap, COTS satellites (since the launch costs are so low) and factory-to-launch-hub transportation might become a significant cost. This is all getting very hypothetical and murky. It’s almost as bad as someone in 1905 trying to predict Curtiss A and M’s 1920 profit margin.
Yes!
BFR is much more than simply a ‘game changer.’ And as you point out the availability of such a system requires quite a bit of re-thinking. So much of the ‘old space’ approach to human expansion depends, for instance, on way stations and on expendables. When those and other elements are no longer needed, plans for extra-LEO travel simply unravel.
SO many constraints are removed that existing or conceptual expansion plans are fully obviated.
It’s a New Age, and it needs a name. Old Space became New Space. BFR brings us something entirely new. “Our Space”?
It looks like they let him touch a lot of stuff. I guess they aren’t that picky on flight hardware š
Actions? SLS and Orion will continue (per many) and the path to BEO and ‘mooning’, ISS splashdown in ~2024; and let ‘commercial’ fend for themselves is the current plan. Elections have consequences.
Yep, and this one may finally break the log jam in space.
As soon as ISS is in the ocean NASA will be no longer in competition with private space stations. So private firms will be able to finally move forward. It will be just like commercial launch. As long as NASA was launching private satellites at MC (1962-1986) no private firm could compete with them. Once NASA was barred from doing so the private launch industry emerged,
And when its clear that SLS/Orion will not cut it, they will be “fired”. They would probably be fired already if Mr. Trump didn’t owe Senator Shelby a favor.
Not just that the companies would not compete against the shuttle. Congress actually made it, through regulations, impossible to compete. Legislation had to be passed to specifically allow it. Even today, we still do not have all the legislation in place to allow freedom of action for launching commercial passengers. Congressional space state members still has NASA in the picture for commercial passengers launches and have balked at passing the laws and regs to make an easy transfer. It was only the last President, Obama, that signed off on a person picking up a rock and being able to claim it. There still are bars on free flow of capital moving outward, but forces are slowly chipping away at it.
This observation benefits, at least in part, from hindsight. Only recently has private space been able to consider and finally achieve orbit. This ability is the direct result of decades’ experimentation, trials, and a fair amount of rapid deconstruction, chiefly as NASA lit the way forward.
Standing on the shoulders of giants indeed.
The first commercial launch licenses after Challenger were for Deltas and Atlas rockets owned by old space. In the 1960’s and 1970’s the Deltas and Atlas rockets of that period put commercial payloads in space. The difference was NASA bought the rockets and then resold the flights to the commercial payloads at an government set price based in theory on MC.
NASA could have stepped out of the loop at anytime, or never even got involved, but choose to do so. If they didn’t get involved it would have created the legal environment and a market price system for commercial launch services in the 1960’s instead of after the Challenger Accident.
Get a down-arrow for inaccuracy, Tom. The ISS is not only NOT in competition with current, non-existent private space stations….it’s going to be the only reason there will be any at all. later. Without NASA’s policy to jump-start a commercial cargo industry- and coincidentally essentially saving SpaceX, and thus progress in space launch, in the process – there will be no private space stations. Without a commercial crew program, which followed – like commercial cargo, riding on the back of ISS’s needs – again, no future commercial space stations. And Bigelow, far from feeling held back, is wanting to attach even bigger modules to ISS, before going full free-flyer, as part of the overall multi-year transition.
As for the 1980s and NASA was launching private satellites ….no private firm could compete with them. Once NASA was barred from doing so the private launch industry emerged,, that’s extremely misleading. The commercial launch industry in the 80s was successfully transitioning from ELVs to commercial, from-the-shuttle-based, launches. Before Challenger, in fact, most (not some) of all major shuttle payloads, were by commercial launch companies, having developed- on their own dime- things like the PAM-A, PAM-D, TOS, and smaller commercial launch systems that flew from the shuttle. (I was the NASA lead for that process/systems in Houston). When, post-Challenger, Reagan arbitrarily kicked those majority of (commercial) payload delivery systems off of shuttle, there was, indeed, a huge winner…..Arianespace, which went to town on that decision for many, many years. In the US, no commercial ELV system successfully emerged…..not a single one. The commercial US systems that piggybacked off of the shuttle’s existence were essentially a forerunner of whatās happened using ISS: because of ISS, we will have multi-competitor commercial cargo systems, commercial crew systems; and Nanoracks, andā¦.etc.
As Mark Twain said, ātis not so amazing, the older he got, the number of things that he could remember; but, the number of things he could remember, that never really happened that way. No ISSā¦.no commercial cargo, or crew, or Nanoracks; no commercial stations. Period.
Flew from the Shuttle once in orbit, not from a commerical launch vehicle is the key term here. That is like claiming you delivered a package in a private car after a USAF C-130 flies your car a thousand miles to the local airport š
But you also skip over the ELVs NASA used to launch commercial payloads before the Shuttle at Marginal Cost. Yes, Arianespace made out well, it made out because NASA had so suppressed the American launch industry there weren’t even rules for licensing it.
Bigelow has been waiting a decade to launch his commercial station, he has the money to do so, but Boeing and SpaceX are just too busy going after the easy government dollars. His $50 million America just couldn’t compete against the hundreds of millions in tax payer dollars being used to out bid him. CCP has taken almost a decade as the firm’s move at the NASA pace to get the NASA dollars as NASA contractors, even though Dragon has been flying since 2010. Compared that to the time it took to develop the Gemini and Apollo capsules when technology when you had slide rules and drafting boards to work with.
Work always expand to fit the funding and time government contracts allow. CCP is a good example of this rule.
No private firm would want to compete with the space shuttle. NASA was selling launches of payloads on the shuttle for FAR less than the full cost. In other words, no private firm wanted to compete with the US Government, which should come as no surprise.
This was true prior to Challenger, after th loss the Shuttle was limited to ISS payloads, including some experiments but mainly hardware and supplies.
This is a sign of things to come. Commercial space will begin to fill roles only held by NASA and the big 3. I don’t see SLS flying more than once. It’s all up to commercial space providers to demonstrate capability over the next few years. Do that, and you will change access to orbit forever.
We see so many policy decisions being made by poorly informed ādecidersā. And this is one arena – space – where a robust āboth sidesā argument could be made.
Which leads to this question: how informed is the VP? Is a a longtime space geek? Is this a genuine effort to learn things? Does he have a sense that space policy is both a very wide and very deep river?
Iām flummoxed, really, by the decisions that must be made by folks who are truly ignorant. Itās why, in my own view, I will choose a āpolicy wonkā whenever given the opportunity. And to achieve an adequately based degree of wonkitude a person needs many years of true curiosity and contact.
Does Mr. Pence fit that description? More to the point can he accurately assess his own abilities ?
Likely not, although I do pose the question based on my own ignorance of Mr. Pence; and note that in that situation, politicians will fall back on decision modalities more fairly called personal predilection or slogans (I.e. āwe donāt want to choose sidesā).