A Giant Leap for Commercial Spaceflight
A satellite put in orbit by the first privately funded liquid fueled rocket may signal the end of NASA dominance of the heavens.
A small Malaysian satellite was delivered to orbit late Monday night from the tiny atoll of Kwajalein far off in the Pacific Ocean and thousands of miles from the U.S. mainland.
Forty years after the first moon landing and over half a century after Sputnik, the launch of small satellites has become routine. But this one was special — or rather, its launcher was. Launched two days before the fortieth anniversary of the launch of Apollo XI (the anniversary of the moon landing itself will be on Monday, July 20), it was the first satellite delivered by a privately funded liquid rocket.
The event may have been a significant nail in the coffin of what many view as NASA’s current flawed plans for a return to the moon in the coming decade.
It was delivered by a Falcon 1, the first rocket developed by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, California. It was the fifth flight of the vehicle and the second successful one, the first three having failed with customer payloads aboard. The two most recent consecutive successes are a large boost for the prospects of not just the Falcon 1, which has a limited market and was more of a learning tool for the new company, but the much larger Falcon 9, planned to make its first flight out of Cape Canaveral late this year.
The two vehicles share many components, particularly the engine (also developed from scratch by SpaceX) which is used in both stages, so confidence in its own upcoming success will be increased considerably.
So what does this have to do with NASA’s planned Constellation program for a lunar return?
It is currently under fire as a result of serious technical issues for the planned new launchers, with exploding cost estimates and schedule slips. Accordingly, to provide information for Charles Bolden, the incoming NASA administrator, they are under review by a panel of experts led by space industry veteran Norman Augustine. The current plan is a new rocket called Ares 1, for launching the crew, and Ares V, a heavy-lift vehicle for delivering the other payloads needed for a lunar mission. Both vehicles are based on a new version of the Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster and an updated version of the J2-S LOX-hydrogen engine that was used on the Saturn V for Apollo.
The Augustine panel will be reviewing alternatives to it and was already briefed on them in June.
Among those alternatives are using the existing or modified commercial Atlas and Delta rockets provided by the United Launch Alliance (a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin), a different Shuttle-derived concept developed by some renegade NASA employees called DIRECT, and a late entrant — a Shuttle-derived heavy lifter, presented to the panel by John Shannon, the current head of the Shuttle program.
The latter appears to be the official NASA fallback position should the current Constellation plans, which no longer have a NASA administrator to defend them (though he continues to do so from his new position on the faculty of the University of Alabama in Huntsville), be radically altered.
But one other option on the table — at least to close the “gap” caused by the fact that the Shuttle is planned to be retired in 2010, while the new rocket and crew capsule are now not expected before 2016 or 2017 — is the SpaceX Falcon 9 and SpaceX’s own crew capsule, named the Dragon.
Falcon 9 and Dragon were developed with SpaceX’s own money, though the company has received some NASA funds via the Commercial Space Transportation Services (COTS) program, designed to help with space station logistics after Shuttle retirement. COTS funds currently are only to support cargo missions, but there are plans, not currently funded, for a COTS “D” — a version designed to carry passengers for crew change-out.
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Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer and a consultant in space commercialization, space tourism and Internet security. He offers occasionally biting commentary about infinity and beyond at his weblog, Transterrestrial Musings.
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23 Comments
1. Brian:Good Job Space X. Private industry will always outpace government institutions when there is incentive (profit) involved! Space X has a good chance to make it to Mars about 50 years before NASA. Unless government decides to squash there potential profits with some ridiculous new tax… space tax?
Jul 15, 2009 - 1:30 am 2. Kelly Starks:Just a nit, but since Dragon was designed from the start to be manned, and even the cargo version needs full life support (due to the need to carry live cargo and the need for breathable air when they open the hatch on the ISS); all they need to do for COTS-D is add a escape tower.
Jul 15, 2009 - 5:52 am 3. Paul in MI:Brian:
Jul 15, 2009 - 6:12 am 4. Paul in MI:“Private industry will always outpace government institutions when there is incentive (profit) involved!”
Well obviously not in this case, they’ve managed to achieve what the Soviet Union(!) accomplished 40 years ago. I’m all for commercializing space but there’s no money to be made there yet. Exploration is almost always funded by governments. Columbus, Magellan, Lewis & Clark, Apollo 11 were all government funded. I wouldn’t go buying stock in Space X until they can find a way to make money that doesn’t involve a grant from NASA. Having said that, it’s still an amazing achievement for a small private company and my hat’s off to them.
“Defenders of the Orion point out that it is designed not just for low earth orbit, but to get crew all the way to lunar orbit and back, but this can’t account for the two orders of magnitude difference in estimated development cost.”
Jul 15, 2009 - 6:20 am 5. Paul in MI:Distance to the moon: 384,403 km
Distance to low orbit: 2000 km
Does that look like 2 orders of magnitude? Cause it looks like 2 orders of magnitude to me.
I should clarify my earlier statement. There’s no money to be made in deep space at the moment. Slinging satellites into orbit is potentially profitable, sending a manned mission to mars is not.
Jul 15, 2009 - 6:24 am 6. Middleman:I don’t think anyone is against private industry taking over the role of development or transportation of materials into space, however NASA still plays a major role and probably will for much of our lifetime.
Jul 15, 2009 - 6:57 am 7. Paul of Alexandria:Unless you are talking about satellite deployment or potential asteroid belt mining, private industry is not interested in space exploration yet. It’s still up to NASA to carry the burden.
I actually have a friend who is in law school studying Space law of all things, and is currently working on the side for NASA. He laments how NASA almost was more advanced in 1969 than it is now.
Paul in MI (3):
True, but we’re well beyond the exploration stage now. By any reasonably timeline we should have had commercial space stations and lunar bases by now.
The problem has actually been NASA and the government space program. Where NASA should be concentrating on developing next-generation technology in support of commercial spaceflight (as it does on the “Aeronautics” side of the house for air flight) NASA has – for a variety of mostly political reasons – been running its own inefficient space launch program.
The Space Shuttle, while a stunning achievement, should have been retired 20 years ago. It was never meant to be more than a stop-gap system until a fully reusable launch vehicle type could be developed. See G. Harry Stine’s book “Halfway to Anywhere” for a fully developed argument on the economics of fully reusable launch systems.
Only now, with Burt Rutan’s Spaceship One and some others under development are we getting close to economic, commercial use of space. To tell the truth, SpaceX should have been at this point 20 years ago.
Jul 15, 2009 - 7:46 am 8. Paul of Alexandria:Middleman (6):
It can be argued that NASA is a great deal of the problem, although ITAR probably comes in first. As mentioned above, NASA is primarily a political animal. Apollo politicized space-exploration and exploitation severely, to the point where private industry other than NASA or DoD contractors couldn’t get any money out of it.
Let’s be careful here. Which “burden” are you talking about? I will agree that it’s NASA’s job to do space exploration, with such as Pioneer, Voyager or Galileo. (NOAA actually handles the Earth-sensing satellites). However, NASA should not be running the ISS, nor should it be running the Shuttle program, any more than the DoD runs the C-130 production lines. NASA’s job (outside of exploration) should be to develop technology and to set standards for commercial industry, then it should get out of the way.
NASA is heavily politicized, and its major problem is a culture of “cannot fail” due to the heavy political exposure. What I find interesting is the recent work on the ISS, where a great deal of effort is expended minimize spacewalks and to ensure that astronauts can reach things while tethered to the Shuttle’s Robotic Arm. Excuse me, didn’t we develop a MMU backpack a while back precisely to free astronauts from the tethering requirement? But that might be risky.
The Shuttle and the ISS are supposed to be platforms for industry and science to use for experimentation. However they are almost impossible to use because of the paperwork and testing required, which go far beyond what would be sensibly required to assure safety.
Jul 15, 2009 - 8:00 am 9. Patrick:I should have told my Subaru dealer I might be driving my Outback cross-country, in addition to commuting locally. He could have charged me $500K.
Jul 15, 2009 - 8:12 am 10. Paul in MI:Paul of Alexandria (7)
Jul 15, 2009 - 8:32 am 11. billslayer:Maybe we should have had commercial space stations and moon bases by now. But where’s the profit incentive? I would love to vacation on the moon but right now it costs $10,000 per pound to get a payload into even low earth orbit. Asteroid mining is interesting in theory but the costs of nickel and iron on earth would have to skyrocket before it was worth it to make a 12 month trip to the asteroid belt and back. Launch costs will make most business models impossible until we find a cheaper way to get out of the gravity well.
Kudos to SpaceX. That’s fantastic…but lots please not allow ideology to trump nationalism. We need NASA. The Ares V will allow us to get to the moon and explore the possibility of using Helium 3 as a fuel for fusion reactors. This is more important than almost anything else in terms of getting somewhere with real energy independence.
Jul 15, 2009 - 8:42 am 12. Anonymous:Helium 3 is the reason to have a base on the moon. Mars does not seem like a reasonable goal until we have base on the moon, it may even make mars that much easier using the moon as launchpad instead of earth.
Jul 15, 2009 - 8:44 am 13. Rand Simberg:Distance to the moon: 384,403 km
Distance to low orbit: 2000 km
Does that look like 2 orders of magnitude? Cause it looks like 2 orders of magnitude to me.
LEO is actually more like 300 km, but unfortunately for your argument, the development cost of of a crew capsule doesn’t scale much with the distance that it travels. And the Ares 1 only delivers it to LEO.
Jul 15, 2009 - 9:04 am 14. Stan Wright:Distance to the moon: 384,403 km
Distance to low orbit: 2000 km
Does that look like 2 orders of magnitude? Cause it looks like 2 orders of magnitude to me.
Try scaling the problem as one of the energy required to reach the target, not one of the distance. It will be a better yardstick, and SpaceX’s accomplishments will fare very well against anything NASA has been contemplating.
Jul 15, 2009 - 10:15 am 15. Rick:10 (Paul in MI): “Asteroid mining is interesting in theory but the costs of nickel and iron on earth would have to skyrocket before it was worth it to make a 12 month trip to the asteroid belt and back. Launch costs will make most business models impossible until we find a cheaper way to get out of the gravity well.”
That argument only holds if you’re spending the energy to go to the asteroids and back, to use the material here on Earth. If I want 10,000 pounds of nickel-iron in LEO though (to make into whatever – but some whatever that’s meant to stay in orbit), it’s a lot easier to get it from the belt than it is to loft it from the surface of the Earth.
Jul 15, 2009 - 10:54 am 16. Kent:There is a big difference between Dragon and Orion, just as there was a big difference between Apollo and Soyuz. Apollo had over ten times the delta-V and the ability to return to Earth at over 24,000 MPH. Soyuz is purely an orbital vehicle that can enter the atmosphere at 17,500 MPH. That said, a plan to send a Soyuz to the moon simply means adding a second propulsive stage and a second heat shield. Dragon launches on a Falcon 9. Space-X is also developing a Falcon 9 Heavy, which is far larger. A Falcon 9 Heavy launching a “Dragon 2″ could easily match Ares I/Orion, although the capsule itself would probably be redesigned from scratch. All that said, I still support Ares V. The economies of scale of super-heavy-lift boosters is vital to lunar base construction and interplanetary exploration.
Jul 15, 2009 - 10:59 am 17. IcePilot:Please,
The proper measure for the cost of movement in space is change in velocity, with deep gravity wells like Earth (or Mars) being the difficult and costly parts, hence the phrase “halfway to anywhere”, referring to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). With SpaceX demonstrating the ability to escape Earth and (hopefully) Bigalow providing cheap, lightweight and voluminous structure, private industry has access to space. And space equals unlimited energy, unlimited resources and no gravity.
LET THE GOLDRUSH* BEGIN!!
* and H3, palladium, platinum, etc.
Jul 15, 2009 - 11:51 am 18. IcePilot:Also,
Gravity wells are why Mars is a dead end. Space will happen when industrialists figure out how to make a buck up there. Ask yourself this question – what will ever be produced on Mars and sold for a profit on Earth?
The path ahead is to the Moon for H3 and to Earth-crossing asteroids (minimal delta-v) for every element in the periodic table.
Elon Musk will show that access to space can be done for millions, privately, rather than billions via NASA.
And that will change everything.
Jul 15, 2009 - 12:01 pm 19. Rand Simberg:The economies of scale of super-heavy-lift boosters is vital to lunar base construction and interplanetary exploration.
No, it is not. This fetish for heavy lifters is what is preventing us from opening the solar system. What we need is affordable launch, and you don’t get there by spending tens of billions of dollars on something that only flies a few times a year.
Jul 15, 2009 - 12:20 pm 20. Paul of Alexandria:Paul in MI (10):
Please be careful here – that’s not the issue. If there is profit possible, then commercial entitities can find it. We’re starting with tourism, minerals and beamed power may follow.
The main issue is whether the government is obstructing the commercial utilization of space resources or helping it. Right now, the NASA space program is almost purely political. All of the commercial work is going on either at NOAA or DoD.
A secondary point is that space stations and moonbases are places not projects in and of themselves. McMurdo Base in Antarctica doesn’t exist simply to exist, it is there to support scientific exploration.
The government and NASA should be making every effort to develop cheap, reusable launch capabilities, and to open the ISS to commercial operation so that the private entities can find the economic justification for further use.
A very good analogy is the building of the first trans-continential railroad in the U.S. It was partly, if not mostly, subsidized by the government through land grants, because no individual company could otherwise have accomplished the task. It has since, however, paid for itself many times over on the taxes on freight and passengers hauled (AMTRACK aside).
Jul 15, 2009 - 7:17 pm 21. M. Report:If NASA had an Evil Twin in the computing field,
we would still be using derivatives of SAGE, and
both Gates and Moore would be wage slaves.
Technology has overtaken NASA. More importantly,
Jul 15, 2009 - 9:15 pm 22. Richard:the wealth available from space exploitation
is a now a national survival issue; Solar power
beamed down from orbit could be used to pay off
a lot of the debt we owe to China, et. al.
So where were all these so-called conservatives as the republican senator from Alabama has repeatedly defended his government pork? Why do we only hear about his porkiness now, when republicans are out of power, instead of a constant drumbeat to get people like him out of office when you could actually do something about it?
…and republicans wonder why they lose elections. The people are sick of this two-faced double-standard on government spending that is now blatantly out of control.
“But they’re worse!” when talking about democrats is no damned excuse, and y’all know it.
Jul 16, 2009 - 8:13 am 23. R Miller:Paul in Mi (10) um, based on the commonest stony meteorite samples and density, one 5-km diameter asteroid contains 81% “worthless” silicate rock, 2.57 e+16 grams of iron, worth $8.6 trillion @ pig iron price of $0.335/kg; 2.96 e+15 grams of nickel worth $87.2 trillion @ Ni price of $29.515/kg; 1.76 e+14 grams of cobalt worth $11.3 trillion @ 64.00/kg…
…and 4,609 metric tons of gold ($130 billion) as an impurity.
don’t worry too much about depressing the market, that’s what futures contracts are for.
Jul 17, 2009 - 9:54 am