About that update plan...
Yeah, it's not happening the way I planned. I thought that I would finish my post in a week. I kept on editing and editing until finally I forgot it completely. I'm going to to switch to a shorter post more unplanned update style.
This mini post is being written on a train with my cell. There will be no proof read, spell check or fancy pictures. It'll just be stuff I think is cool.
Today the topic is New Space. If you are unfamiliar with that term it means any private non-government space program. Off the top of my head there are several I could name:
Spacex (my favorite)
Cignus
Virgin Galactic
Masten Aerospace
Armadillo Aerospace
Blue Origins
Sierra Nevada Corporation
Bigelow Aerospace
Linx Aerospace
Excalibur Alamaz
Planetary Resources
Deep Space Industries
Space Exploration
Many of these make their money by selling to the US government. In the past companies like Boeing, Lockheed, ATK and Playtex (yes that Playtex, they made spacesuits as well as bras) have built things for NASA - but there is a vital difference. All these were NASA driven, and the senate is in NASA's driver's seat.
During the great space race NASA did whatever worked. There was only one goal set by the government - go to the moon. Nothing else mattered. Scientists look at blueprints and picked the cheapest one, the one that looked like it would work. Cost, speed and innovation were the watch-words of the day. NASA was very efficient for a government entity.
Then the worst thing for NASA happened, our competitor all but disappeared. With the death of their chief designer followed by their demoralizing defeat in the race to the Moon the Soviet space program all but disappeared. Low earth orbit was the new goal. NASA managed to do a few things on inertia - a few more moon landings were done and Skylab was launched with left-over Apollo gear. Then began the change.
Apollo launched Apollo with 4.1% of the USA's budget. That was the first to change. NASA runs on less than .05% of the budget today. This slowed progress down. Next there were more goals set for NASA by the senate: go back to the moon, land rovers on Mars, put satellites in orbit, invent better airplanes, build a reusable space plane (shuttle), come up with new engines, build a space station, invent robots for space, do medical research, figure out how the weather works, launch space telescopes, refuel and repair satellites and run education programs - all at once. By the way, do it only with the technologies we pick, after all we want jobs in our district.
Guess what that means. NASA is a jobs program now. The senate wants to reuse shuttle parts for new rockets, just to send jobs to ATK. It makes no good sense.
I'm not just talking here. I have hours of specific examples, but I won't subject you to my whiny tirade (unless you ask for it in the comments below), so I'll just give one example. Do you remember the X-33? No? Back in the '90s there was a cool program to replace the space shuttle called Venturestar. It was a single-stage to low-earth-orbit space-plane (I'm running out of dashes) with a revolutionary engine. The half-scale prototype was the X-33. Great promise in this thing. The design had this crazy complicated lobed tank design. The higher-ups specified a carbon-fiber (seriously, more dashes) fuel tank, because everybody knows those are lighter right? I'll let you in on a secret, carbon-fiber can't do tight corners easily. If you put a bend in it you need way more material to get it strong enough. The extra material was enough to put it way over the weight budget. The engineers shook their heads and said "This is stupid, it will never work. We can build it out of aluminum/lithium alloy like on the space shuttle for way less money and less weight." They did. They were just about to put the light and strong tank to the test when the NASA director testified before congress that his program needed a little more budget for the carbon-fiber tank. It became law that the tank HAD to be Carbon-fiber. So the program spent the rest of it's budget exploding too-heavy carbon tanks on a test stand until it was cancelled. The end. Just one of hundreds of stories.
Enter new space. Private companies looked at the space program and said "Oh come on, it's only rocket science!" They began to beat NASA at their own game. Instead of going to NASA and taking orders with NASA's pork-bloated blueprints, they produced a design using good sense and looked for buyers. Spacex has a launch system less than 1/10th the cost of the shuttle per pound to low-earth-orbit. Bigelow took an old NASA design that failed because law-makers got in the way, and will launch next the first manned version next year. Sierra Nevada Corp. is also using a NASA cast-off. Virgin cut NASA out all together and made a space airline just for fun. Everybody still has to play by NASA's rules (they must get permits and pass safety tests), but the change is that NASA doesn't pick the technique, just the product.
This brings us to the last new field: asteroid mining. A single m-type asteroid may have more platinum than all the platinum humans have ever mined in all history. There is water, helium 3 and iron too, all very expensive to launch. So companies are starting to appear. Deep Space Industries just launched. This is the second mining company, they are competing with Planetary Resources. This one launched with a daring video showing a long term future. Nobody has had the guts to do that. Once I get to the office I'll add the video and post it.
Special bonus: try to spot the Avatar reference in the video.
Cheers!
Yeah, it's not happening the way I planned. I thought that I would finish my post in a week. I kept on editing and editing until finally I forgot it completely. I'm going to to switch to a shorter post more unplanned update style.
This mini post is being written on a train with my cell. There will be no proof read, spell check or fancy pictures. It'll just be stuff I think is cool.
Today the topic is New Space. If you are unfamiliar with that term it means any private non-government space program. Off the top of my head there are several I could name:
Spacex (my favorite)
Cignus
Virgin Galactic
Masten Aerospace
Armadillo Aerospace
Blue Origins
Sierra Nevada Corporation
Bigelow Aerospace
Linx Aerospace
Excalibur Alamaz
Planetary Resources
Deep Space Industries
Space Exploration
Many of these make their money by selling to the US government. In the past companies like Boeing, Lockheed, ATK and Playtex (yes that Playtex, they made spacesuits as well as bras) have built things for NASA - but there is a vital difference. All these were NASA driven, and the senate is in NASA's driver's seat.
During the great space race NASA did whatever worked. There was only one goal set by the government - go to the moon. Nothing else mattered. Scientists look at blueprints and picked the cheapest one, the one that looked like it would work. Cost, speed and innovation were the watch-words of the day. NASA was very efficient for a government entity.
Then the worst thing for NASA happened, our competitor all but disappeared. With the death of their chief designer followed by their demoralizing defeat in the race to the Moon the Soviet space program all but disappeared. Low earth orbit was the new goal. NASA managed to do a few things on inertia - a few more moon landings were done and Skylab was launched with left-over Apollo gear. Then began the change.
Apollo launched Apollo with 4.1% of the USA's budget. That was the first to change. NASA runs on less than .05% of the budget today. This slowed progress down. Next there were more goals set for NASA by the senate: go back to the moon, land rovers on Mars, put satellites in orbit, invent better airplanes, build a reusable space plane (shuttle), come up with new engines, build a space station, invent robots for space, do medical research, figure out how the weather works, launch space telescopes, refuel and repair satellites and run education programs - all at once. By the way, do it only with the technologies we pick, after all we want jobs in our district.
Guess what that means. NASA is a jobs program now. The senate wants to reuse shuttle parts for new rockets, just to send jobs to ATK. It makes no good sense.
I'm not just talking here. I have hours of specific examples, but I won't subject you to my whiny tirade (unless you ask for it in the comments below), so I'll just give one example. Do you remember the X-33? No? Back in the '90s there was a cool program to replace the space shuttle called Venturestar. It was a single-stage to low-earth-orbit space-plane (I'm running out of dashes) with a revolutionary engine. The half-scale prototype was the X-33. Great promise in this thing. The design had this crazy complicated lobed tank design. The higher-ups specified a carbon-fiber (seriously, more dashes) fuel tank, because everybody knows those are lighter right? I'll let you in on a secret, carbon-fiber can't do tight corners easily. If you put a bend in it you need way more material to get it strong enough. The extra material was enough to put it way over the weight budget. The engineers shook their heads and said "This is stupid, it will never work. We can build it out of aluminum/lithium alloy like on the space shuttle for way less money and less weight." They did. They were just about to put the light and strong tank to the test when the NASA director testified before congress that his program needed a little more budget for the carbon-fiber tank. It became law that the tank HAD to be Carbon-fiber. So the program spent the rest of it's budget exploding too-heavy carbon tanks on a test stand until it was cancelled. The end. Just one of hundreds of stories.
Enter new space. Private companies looked at the space program and said "Oh come on, it's only rocket science!" They began to beat NASA at their own game. Instead of going to NASA and taking orders with NASA's pork-bloated blueprints, they produced a design using good sense and looked for buyers. Spacex has a launch system less than 1/10th the cost of the shuttle per pound to low-earth-orbit. Bigelow took an old NASA design that failed because law-makers got in the way, and will launch next the first manned version next year. Sierra Nevada Corp. is also using a NASA cast-off. Virgin cut NASA out all together and made a space airline just for fun. Everybody still has to play by NASA's rules (they must get permits and pass safety tests), but the change is that NASA doesn't pick the technique, just the product.
This brings us to the last new field: asteroid mining. A single m-type asteroid may have more platinum than all the platinum humans have ever mined in all history. There is water, helium 3 and iron too, all very expensive to launch. So companies are starting to appear. Deep Space Industries just launched. This is the second mining company, they are competing with Planetary Resources. This one launched with a daring video showing a long term future. Nobody has had the guts to do that. Once I get to the office I'll add the video and post it.
Special bonus: try to spot the Avatar reference in the video.
Cheers!
