As for SAS's current view of things, here, briefly, it is: - Radically cheaper space access (ten to a hundred times less than current costs) would be a massive public good, enhancing existing space markets and opening up potentially huge new ones, creating new opportunities for research, exploration, commerce, and defense. - Such access is possible in the near term with current technology, at sufficiently high flight rates. Rocketry has become more medium- tech than high, as witness among other things growing third-world missile proliferation. At the same time, modern lightweight materials and electronics greatly ease combining the necessary high performance, the ability to abort intact in case of problems, and fast-turnaround reusability, allowing breakout from the traditional expendable-missile "ammunition" design mindset, with potential huge benefits to low-cost reliability. What's been lacking to date has been the proper combination of reasonable goals (it's DC-3 time, not 747), sensible focussed management, good engineering (KISS), and funding. Much depends on a leap of faith that large new markets will emerge to support the necessary higher flight rates - "if you build it, they will come". At least two such new markets, tourism and post revolution-in- military-affairs defense, are growing steadily less speculative. As for who might produce such access anytime soon... - Certainly Not NASA In the best of all possible worlds, we'd have long ago dismantled the NASA "human spaceflight" empire for being a massively inflexible bureaucracy neither capable of making nor willing to make any significant changes in what they do: Flying a half-dozen people on a half-dozen missions a year at over a billion dollars a mission. We'd have put money into low-cost access X-projects and investment incentives, and once the results started flying we'd have rebuilt NASA as a genuine leading-edge research and exploration agency flying hundreds of times a year on other people's rockets at less cost than it now flies a half-dozen times a year on its own. Alas, in this imperfect world NASA JSC/KSC/MSFC represents a volume of Federal funding impossible to radically redirect with the available political capital. The current White House still has only thin Congressional majorities, and obviously has higher priorities than radical reform of NASA - the loss of Columbia and the damning CAIB Report may have changed this equation, but how much so is not yet clear. Administrator O'Keefe's immediate brief at NASA still seems to be what he was hired to do - to stop the bleeding, to impose actual accounting of where the money goes and to steer the agency back toward meeting existing obligations without busting future budgets. In this context, we see the "Orbital Space Plane" (OSP) project as being the best ("least bad", if you will) use of the existing NASA new-launch funding wedge of a billion or so a year practical under current political constraints. It is a definite improvement on NASA's previous "Space Launch Initiative" goal of a budget-busting all-up Shuttle replacement designed primarily to drop painlessly into the current Shuttle operations bureaucracy, yet also touted as meeting US commercial launch needs - seriously muddying the waters for genuine commercial space transportation investment. OSP has the virtue of assuring NASA's minimum manned launch needs (whatever one may think of the current agency, we do now have international obligations to meet) without much danger of anyone plausibly pretending it addresses commercial markets too. OSP will definitely need external supervision, however - NASA so far is showing every sign of bloating OSP into a drawn-out over-budget Shuttle-minus-the-payload-bay if left to their own devices. One thing we would like to see from NASA (though we're not holding our breath) would be for them to publicly state that launch cost reductions impractical in the context of their large and inflexible organization, complex requirements, and miniscule flight rate may be eminently practical elsewhere - NASA's repeated oversimplification of "it's impossible for us" into "it's impossible" seriously muddys the waters for commercial cheap-launch investment. - Probably Not DOD The Defense Department is starting to get interested. Discussing the military implications of near-term radically cheaper on-demand launch hasn't been career suicide for a couple of years now, DARPA is funding some useful work, and the Air Force is starting to make interested noises about fast-response space access. Unfortunately DOD's last reorganization consolidated space under USAF, which over the medium term is allergic to anything which might compete with F-22 and F-35 funding. We don't expect DOD to produce radically cheaper access anytime soon. - Almost Certainly Not BoeNorLock The existing major aerospace companies may or may not still be organizationally capable of developing radically cheaper space transportion - recent signs are not good - but this is a moot question, since absent a deep-pockets government customer, none of them will try. They've had that sort of risk-taking thoroughly squeezed out of them over the last generation. It ain't gonna happen. - The Startups This leaves the entrepreneurial startups as our main hope for a cheap space transportation revolution. None of them yet look like much - a few of them have test-flown hardware, but on average they tend to be a handful of engineers with shoestring funding, an ambitious business plan, and a partially refined design - but historically, every time there's been a revolution in transportation technology, new companies have taken over from the old established leaders. The massively complex organizational structures that evolved to squeeze marginally acceptable reliability out of modified artillery rockets are more hindrance than help in dealing with the new high-flight-rate reusable paradigm. The startups should be supported and encouraged - individually they're long shots, but collectively they're by far our best bet for a spacefaring future. Practically speaking, this means we at SAS are supporting the folks competing for the X-Prize (and a few who chose other paths) while encouraging the Federal commercial launch regulators to strike a reasonable balance between public safety and not strangling this new industry in its cradle. We have seen significant progress in this regard in the last year. One of the more useful things we can see to do right now is to support HR 3245, the Commercial Space Act of 2003, which codifies and formalizes some of these gains, making them far less subject to regulatory agency infighting or the whim of future White Houses.
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