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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