Ex Cunabula ad Astra

It looks like Paul Allen is getting together with Virgin Atlantic to form a venture that will provide private spaceflights by 2008. (hat tip: VodkaPundit) Paul Allen is the money behind Space Ship One, about to attempt the X-Prize. In other words, humanity is on the verge of venturing from the Earth's cradle into space to stay - out of the cradle, endlessly orbiting - and it will largely be due to one man's efforts - as most great advances usually are. So any time you are thinking of bashing Microsoft (which I often do, as well), at least keep in mind what it has enabled.

UPDATE: And a follow-on prize: $50 million for getting a 7-person orbital machine by the end of the decade. Excellent!

UPDATE: Virgin Galactic's web site.

Amazing SpaceShip One Pictures

Via Due Diligence, here is the best set of SpaceShip One flight images I've yet seen. All of these are from the first SpaceShip One flight to actually get into space.

Milestone

Congratulations to Mike Melvill and the folks at Scaled Composites on the successful flight of Space Ship One today, becoming the first non-governmental spaceflight.

Ex Cunabula Ad Astra

In the far future, this event, if it is successful, may be seen as the real beginning of the human colonization of space. The reason I say this is that if private companies and investors are able to get into space in an affordable fashion, uses (by which I mean, ways to make money) will be found for being there. This would in turn lead to more people going, more ways of profiting from being in space being found, and so forth. The government cannot remove us from our cradle; it has no incentive. But private industry can.

Not that I'm excited or anything.

Settling Space

In the early days of aviation, it was not uncommon for the government to offer prizes for accomplishing certain feats. Private people and organizations were also involved. Today, the X-Prize foundation is attempting to take that idea into the space age, with a $10 million prize for the first 3-person craft to fly to 100km altitude twice in 2 weeks.

It's a laudable goal, but only half of the equation. The government is too busy repeating itself to even take a good look at what our goals in space should be. Given the nature of government and bureaucracy, it's not surprising that NASA has become an organization whose primary use is to extract more funding, turning it into jobs (and thus votes) in key congressional districts. However, the government could quite easily get a lot done in space, for significantly less money than is currently being invested, if it wanted to. It could do this by offering prizes for a variety of tasks which do not require research to attempt, because that has already been done. For example:

1. The international space station could be awarded to the first private group which puts a person on board the station. This has the added benefit of getting that white elephant off the taxpayers' backs.
2. The X-Prize could be matched with government money, radically altering the cost equation and bringing more competitors into the field. Alternatively, the money could be used to extend the timeline of the X-Prize.
3. A prize of $50 million could be offered for the first private manned flight to LEO, and a further $100 million for the first private manned flight to GEO.
4. A prize of $250 million could be offered for the first private lunar surface probe, a further prize of $2 billion for the first private person to get to the moon, and finally a prize of $3 billion for the first private person to get to the moon and stay there for 1 year.
5. Similar prizes for Mars, but with larger payouts ($30 billion for the first person, another $20 billion if they stay for at least 1 Earth year, etc), could be offered.

The key would be to force the prize winners to make their designs public, and allow royalty-free use of their patents after they are awarded the prize. This would advance the state of the art, as well as likely providing a market for NASA to cheaply obtain needed equipment to fulfill whatever goals the government finds useful. Finally, this concept would start the exploration of space in earnest. (I'd bet you that someone would come up with a ship that could take a crew to Mars for a year, and use it to try to collect all of the prizes. Heck, I'd be looking for funding, because I think it could be done for less than the amounts specified above: there's not much new science here, and the engineering is well-understood.)

It'll never happen, of course, because the government is a control freak by nature, but it's nice to contemplate.

Apollo Redux? Not Likely

Transterrestrial Musings talks about NASA's plans for the Orbital Space Plane, which is "intended to provide crew and limited cargo access to and from the International Space Station." Apparently, NASA is considering an Apollo CM-inspired design, because of all of the problems that NASA has had with winged orbiters and OSP designs.

The problem is, you see, that this is not just an upgraded Apollo CM. It would be a completely new design, that happened to be a capsule with the same pitch as the Apollo CM. The structure would be new, the controls new, the atmospheric system new, the heat shield new and so on. While this would still likely be cheaper than a fully-reusable winged system (and that should scare you if you pay US taxes!), the real problem is not with the wings. The problem is that NASA has forgotten how to design effective spacecraft. No matter what the technical requirements are, the primary drivers of any NASA program are political: what will offer the best shot at keeping NASA funded, and preferably increasing the budget.

As a result, it is almost a guarantee that any large NASA program will fail. Only small programs (like the "faster, better, cheaper" missions) have a chance of escaping notice long enough to succeed. The history has been that as soon as they succeed, they get escalated into big follow-on programs which generally fail. I don't see that this will be any different. Indeed, the visual similarity to Apollo is most likely more showmanship than technical requirement. Apollo has a good legacy, so clearly it's in NASA's interest to play up that angle. In real terms though, given the mission requirements, split-pitch capsule (with barely-sloping sides near the base, then sharply-sloping sides further up) would likely provide a better ballistic shape.

But that is probably all academic, since it is likely that NASA will add a significant cross-range requirement to the project, in order to provide flexibility. At that point, a capsule can't meet the requirement.

Regulations and Space Flight

Transterrestrial Musings linked to this MSNBC article, which talks a bit about the regulatory hurdles to space flight. Here is an interesting paragraph, bearing on the costs of certification I discussed below (in the comments).

Another savvy decision by Rutan: He won’t put SpaceShipOne through the FAA certification necessary for commercial aircraft to carry passengers. That process, which can take years, has cost firms like Boeing and Airbus up to 10 times the price of development.

This is a problem, it should be noted, in civil aviation as well as in civil spacefaring. I understand the need for safety - heck, as an aspiring pilot I demand it - but I wonder how much of the aircraft certification process has to do with safety, and how much with bureaucracy.

Space Ship One

It has long been obvious, to many people, that the government cannot establish the kind of low-cost access to space that will be necessary for mass exploitation of space. The reason for this is that all of the incentives for the government and its contractors are to make getting to space, and operating there, as expensive, difficult and time-consuming as possible, so as to preserve their jobs (in the government/NASA) or profits (in the space contracting businesses). The necessary goal, for mass exploitation to be possible, is to have flying into space be not much more rare, expensive or dangerous than flying from city to city.

This vision is still some ways off, but it has gotten perhaps a bit closer to reality. Scaled Composites, the company headed by Burt Rutan, and whose Voyager was the first aircraft to fly around the world without refueling, has developed Space Ship One. Developed entirely with private funding, this craft is designed for sub-orbital flights, but above the customary 50 mile boundary. In other words, making a trip on this spacecraft would make you officially an astronaut. This also makes the craft a contender for the $10 million X Prize, offered to the first team which gets the same 3-person vehicle to 100km altitude twice safely within two weeks.

Like Pioneer's Pathfinder, Space Ship One is attempting to solve the hardest problem, that of getting out of most of the Earth's atmosphere, by using the atmosphere, rather than fighting it. In a traditional rocket, 90% or so of its launch weight is oxidizer, and most of the rest is fuel. As the rocket's throw weight - that is, the payload weight to a given place - grows, the amount of fuel and oxidizer needed also grows, and along with that the weight of the rocket's structure grows. This means that a small increase in throw weight requires a large increase in rocket size. The Pathfinder lessens this problem by using both jets and rockets. The jets power to Pathfinder to altitude, at which point it meets up with a tanker, takes on oxidizer, then points its nose skywards and lights the rockets. This design means that for all practical purposes, Pathfinder is really a specialized aircraft. Space Ship One also uses jets to get out of the lower atmosphere, but in this case the jets are mounted on a carrier aircraft called White Knight. The spacecraft carries its fuel/oxidizer with it, but doesn't have to have the structure to fight through the lower atmosphere, so it is very small and light.

There are a number of interesting design features, including a hybrid rocket motor that burns tire rubber (HTPB) and laughing gas (NO₂); tilting wingtips that "shuttlecock" the craft, for a low-speed reentry which makes reentry heating much less problematic; the development not of prototypes, but of working test articles; and the choice of viewport designs. The vehicle is designed for very low-cost operations, on the order of a Soyuz flight. With the ability to carry (externally) boosters to put microsats into orbit, the vehicle could have a built-in market ready to go (a lot of news organizations, for instance, would love to have additional capacity cheaply on call for satellite phones; and the military could probably use such a capability as well). I don't know how well this design will scale - can you use a larger version to orbit? - but I do know that if anyone can make this concept work, it's Rutan.

Since there is not any apparent attempt to actually use this spacecraft to start a space launch business, my guess is that Rutan intends to sell them to those organizations who could make use of them. In other words, he'll sell them like aircraft, albeit expensive and specialized aircraft.

More coverage here and here (read the comments).

UPDATE (4/21): More detail, for those who care about design, here

UPDATE (8/2): FlugRevue has some summary information of interest. And here is some (old) information on Proteus. You can clearly see the heritage of White Knight in the picture.

And here are the test updates.