Forwarded message:
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Fw: Space Access Update 12/13/02
> Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002 10:45:51 -0800
>
> (Our apologies for the delay in mailing out this Update - our email
> arrangements took a couple days to get up and running again.)
>
> Space Access Update #99 12/13/02
> Copyright 2002 by Space Access Society
> ________________________________________________________________________
>
> Reports of our demise have been greatly exaggerated.
>
> We are still around, watching developments and thinking about what
> comes next. We did spend much of the last six months otherwise
> engaged - we prefer to avoid sleeping on park benches. (Our apologies
> to everyone whose mail we haven't answered over that stretch. We'll
> be working through the backlog RSN.)
>
> But then, not coming close to making a living off this space stuff can
> be a blessing as well as a curse, in that we are not obliged to
> constantly make a public fuss whether we have something to say or not.
> We do, now, have a number of things to say.
>
> For starters, this: One of the more useful things we do is putting on
> our annual conference, bringing players in the cheap access game
> together in one place to focus intensively on access issues. (For
> those of you who like what we do but worry whether we'll keep doing
> it, we'll stop either when cheap access is an accomplished fact, or
> when they pry our cold dead fingers off our last hotel contract.)
>
> Last spring's Space Access '02 conference went well, with attendance
> up and considerable useful work done. Our take on the theme of the
> event: "Building a Place to Stand" - what a number of startup low-cost
> launch companies have spent the recent investment downturn doing.
> Here are a couple of reports from the conference:
>
> http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/marericks_020510.html
>
> http://www.hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/archive/RLV/SAS-2002-Review.html
>
> Meanwhile, preparations for next spring's Space Access '03 conference
> are underway. We have a hotel contract for our traditional last-
> weekend-in-April date at an old favorite site - SA'03 is set for
> Thursday evening April 24th through Saturday night April 26th, 2003,
> at the Old Town Hotel and Conference Center, in downtown Scottsdale
> Arizona. This is the same hotel we were at two years ago, the former
> Holiday Inn Old Town, with new owners and name but otherwise largely
> unchanged, in the heart of Scottsdale's restaurant and shopping
> district, a fifteen minute cab ride from the Phoenix airport. For
> SA'03 room reservations, call 800 695-6995 or 480 994-9203 and ask for
> our "space access" rate of $74 a night. (Our rate is available for
> three days before and after the conference dates.)
>
> As for our 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 high performance with intact
> 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 one such new market, tourism, is 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 - for now at least. Administrator O'Keefe's
> immediate brief at NASA seems to be 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 new "Orbital Space Plane" (OSP) project as
> being the best ("least bad", if you will) use of the existing SLI
> funding wedge practical under current political constraints. It is a
> huge improvement on SLI's previous direction, 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 the slightest chance of
> anyone plausibly pretending it addresses commercial markets too.
>
> We still would like to see NASA formally declare itself out of the
> business of developing commercial space transportation. Further, we
> would like NASA to make explicit 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.
>
> - Probably Not DOD
>
> The Defense Department is starting to get interested - discussing the
> military implications of near-term radically cheaper on-demand launch
> is no longer career suicide for officers, and DARPA is funding some
> useful work as part of their RASCAL project - but DOD's latest
> reorganization consolidated space under USAF, whose space people are
> currently wrapped up in bringing EELV online, and which over the
> medium term isn't interested in anything which might interfere with
> F-22 funding. DOD in general has other more pressing budget
> priorities for the forseeable future. We don't expect DOD to produce
> radically cheaper access anytime soon.
>
> - Almost Certainly Not BoeMacLockMart
>
> 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.
>
> ________________________________________________________________________
>
> Space Access Society's sole purpose is to promote radical reductions
> in the cost of reaching space. You may redistribute this Update in
> any medium you choose, as long as you do it unedited in its entirety.
> ________________________________________________________________________
>
> Space Access Society
> http://www.space-access.org
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> "Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"
> - Robert A. Heinlein
Michael
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Wallis KF6SPF (408) 396-9037 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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