The "REAL" X-Prize - Or how commercial manned space in possible within our lifetimes.

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 19:26:25 -0600, Charles Buckley
wrote:


Every single X aircraft built was custom designed. That point is not
custom design, it is multiple development paths. These are test
articles, conceptually exactly the same as anything ever built under
contract by NASA (which, in it's 45 year history, has built only 36
manned flight vehicles, of which only 30 have been in orbit).

That's not right. Did you count the lifting bodies, the LLRVs, the
LLTVs, the Oblique Wing, AD-1, HiMAT, SRV, DAST, X-36, XV-15, RSRA,
QSRA, and the recent X-aircraft? What about joint projects like X-29?

I haven't even counted the LaRC drop models or the various test bed
aircraft and I'm already up to almost thirty. If you add in the six
Orbiters, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo CMs, and Apollo LMs, I suspect the
number is a lot closer to a hundred.

If you include the NACA, the numbers are even higher. X-1 though
X-15, for example.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer

Mary Shafer wrote:
On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 19:26:25 -0600, Charles Buckley
wrote:



Every single X aircraft built was custom designed. That point is not
custom design, it is multiple development paths. These are test
articles, conceptually exactly the same as anything ever built under
contract by NASA (which, in it's 45 year history, has built only 36
manned flight vehicles, of which only 30 have been in orbit).


That's not right. Did you count the lifting bodies, the LLRVs, the
LLTVs, the Oblique Wing, AD-1, HiMAT, SRV, DAST, X-36, XV-15, RSRA,
QSRA, and the recent X-aircraft? What about joint projects like X-29?




I was only going with orbital on this. The number there is 7 Mercury.
12 Gemini, 12 Apollo, and the orbitors. There were a few other articles
that never flew. His point was that they needed to push the envelope
outwards into higher levels of tech beyond LEO. I consider the level
of development done by the space side of NASA to be about the continual
level of what we can expect.

This "debate" has been one person pointing out that X-Prize does
nothing to compare to the amount of development of work NASA has done
in space and does not lead to it. I am pointing out a) NASA really
has not built a large number of manned space vehicles and none in
the past 30 years and b) the parts of NASA that have the skills and
hands-on engineering experience is mainly on the aviation side working
in roughly the same flight regime as the X-Prize contestants.


The main thrust to this though..

The vast majority of NASA's work was a long time ago. In terms of
current work force, Scaled has comparable levels of skill in building
and designing to the old NACA. I would argue that it has a lot more
hands-on experience than is currently available at the engineering
(not management) level inside NASA.

I am not running down the old NACA side of things. I actually see
what is happening now to be the civilian heir to that sort of
environment.

I haven't even counted the LaRC drop models or the various test bed
aircraft and I'm already up to almost thirty. If you add in the six
Orbiters, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo CMs, and Apollo LMs, I suspect the
number is a lot closer to a hundred.

If you include the NACA, the numbers are even higher. X-1 though
X-15, for example.

Mary

"Charles Buckley" wrote in message
...

I was only going with orbital on this. The number there is 7 Mercury.
12 Gemini, 12 Apollo, and the orbitors. There were a few other articles
that never flew. His point was that they needed to push the envelope
outwards into higher levels of tech beyond LEO. I consider the level
of development done by the space side of NASA to be about the continual
level of what we can expect.


Well, point aside, just to be pedantic:

I get 15 Apollo CSMs, and 9 LMs. And 5 orbiters that flew in LEO and 1 that
did drop tests.

(and that's what's flown. If you're counting 7 Mercury, what's your
cut-off? There were other capsules built but not flown. AS-201.)

"garfangle" wrote in message
om...
By your emphasis of "commercial" I think you mean "private," because
it looks to me like its all philanthropy, a big black hole for the
idle rich, rather than a true venture investment. Because if the
contestants are neither advancing science nor doing something
original, then you cannot consider it a commercial risk that expects
high returns.

Ciao.

Take Scaled for example. If Spaceship One wins the X-prize, with $30,000,000
invested in the project by "The Customer", it gets a return of $10,000,000
for its first flight. Not a bad return on might be a proof-of-concept for a
larger vehicle. ( http://www.thespacereview.com/archive/49f.jpg ). Same
holds true for many other's, I am sure.

I find it interesting that some people believe these new investor's in the
suborbital startups are somehow just idly throwing their money away as a
hobby. Maybe they are turned off because of previous failures like Beal and
AMROC. Typically though, these investors somehow had enough sense to earn
this money, and just possibly they actually have weighed the pro's and cons.
People have been wishing for ages that Bill Gates would invest in the
industry, and when the next best thing actually DOES, people still find a
reason to bitch and moan.

Greg D. Moore (Strider) wrote:
"Charles Buckley" wrote in message
...

I was only going with orbital on this. The number there is 7 Mercury.
12 Gemini, 12 Apollo, and the orbitors. There were a few other articles
that never flew. His point was that they needed to push the envelope
outwards into higher levels of tech beyond LEO. I consider the level
of development done by the space side of NASA to be about the continual
level of what we can expect.



Well, point aside, just to be pedantic:

I get 15 Apollo CSMs, and 9 LMs. And 5 orbiters that flew in LEO and 1 that
did drop tests.

(and that's what's flown. If you're counting 7 Mercury, what's your
cut-off? There were other capsules built but not flown. AS-201.)




it was flown. I was just eyeballing off the webpage and did not really
take time to count closely. It is a number on the order of one per year,
but clustered very early in the development.

"Jon G" wrote in message
...


"garfangle" wrote in message
om...
By your emphasis of "commercial" I think you mean "private," because
it looks to me like its all philanthropy, a big black hole for the
idle rich, rather than a true venture investment. Because if the
contestants are neither advancing science nor doing something
original, then you cannot consider it a commercial risk that expects
high returns.

Ciao.

Take Scaled for example. If Spaceship One wins the X-prize, with
$30,000,000
invested in the project by "The Customer", it gets a return of
$10,000,000
for its first flight. Not a bad return on might be a proof-of-concept for
a
larger vehicle. ( http://www.thespacereview.com/archive/49f.jpg ). Same
holds true for many other's, I am sure.

To be honest that isn't going to interest any insititutional investor. On a
$30m cash input, they are going to want to see at least $300m returned
inside a decade with a clear exit strategy for them to take profits.

I find it interesting that some people believe these new investor's in the
suborbital startups are somehow just idly throwing their money away as a
hobby. Maybe they are turned off because of previous failures like Beal
and
AMROC. Typically though, these investors somehow had enough sense to earn
this money, and just possibly they actually have weighed the pro's and
cons.
People have been wishing for ages that Bill Gates would invest in the
industry, and when the next best thing actually DOES, people still find a
reason to bitch and moan.

"Bruce Hoult" wrote in message
...
In article ,
(garfangle) wrote:

What Apple was doing in 1977 was just a rehash of 50's and 60's computer
technology, at a cheaper price structure. That doesn't mean there
weren't big profits to be made.

Not exactly, they had a relatively low unit cost and a mass market. I'm not
even sure if they took any investment to launch they self funded and maybe
had a little angel funding.

I'm trying to think of any comparable travel or vehicle based business which
has been funded through the classical investment route.

v
"Slightly Cheaper" *is* the answer to how to bring new commercial ventures
into being. When it's cheap enough to go to the Moon and Mars, commercial
ventures will do it. Until then - nada. Technology isn't the issue, or at
least pushing the performance envelope isn't the issue. What's needed is
reliability and low cost. Without those two things, prices will never come
down and extraterrestrial commerce will never advance.


There are no technologies that can reduce the cost of space travel to
the point where it is cost-effective - in other words, that it brings
back more money then it costs do to. The problem is that space is
pretty much a barren, airless waterless wasteland with isolated
pockets of stuff hundreds of thousands to millions of miles apart -
stuff that's no different than the stuff we have right here on Earth,
and nothing we're short enough on to make it worth going out there to
get.

The "killer ap" for space hasn't been thought up yet.


......Andrew
--

(garfangle) wrote in message . com...

Unless the backers of companies like Scaled Composites have some
special insight in rocketry that NASA and its contractors don't have,
then I can't see where the innovation is coming from. Even though
NASA may sometimes waste money, if there was a new technology that
could reduce costs of manned liftoff by a factor of 10 do you not
think they would be investigating it already?

This is a good point--but you're missing the big picture. There is no
one single 'new technology' that will reduce the costs of manned
liftoff. That's why the government is unable to develop a low cost
solution. You don't see where the innovation is coming from precisely
because you're looking for one big, single special technology. That's
not the way innovative engineering wins. Look at any example from any
field of engineering--you'll find that schemes that use some single
big advance in technology usually fail. It's too much to work with.
Winners that innovate use proven technology in new ways or novel
combinations. NASA's stuck right now because its political
requirements have forced it to 'jump over' suborbital development
straight to orbital development--it's just too big a leap for industry
to make in one hop, so NASA is currently forced to maintain its
arbitrary, pricier solutions because there's no industry base for
alternatives.

You can propose all you want. And indeed, I think carefully-drafted
legislation to endorse offworld land claims would be great. But I also
think it's not going to happen, not until there are squatters already
staking out their claims in an unofficial manner.

And how do you suppose the squatters get there? And who would
recognize them? And if governments refused to negotiate, well they
could just stay there and see if they could outlast their oxygen
tanks.

The squatters get there when they can afford to go on their own.
Anybody who wants what the squatters have will recognize them--or at
least have to deal with them. If the government decides to 'outlast
them,' odds are the squatters will happily set up camp and start
mining whatever resource they want, and then sell it, government
notwithstanding.


I applaud your investment of time and money, but IMHO there are better
ways to get what we all are looking for than this extraneous pursuit.
I want to get to space as much as you do, just I think there is a more
efficacous plan.

That efficacous plan being . . ?
Here's mine.
Personally I prefer the government to "open" new areas like Mars,
Moon, asteroids, etc. by 1. sending robotic surveyors 2. sending human
explorers to 'see what we can see' and 3. making government paid-for
manned 'safe havens' that reduce risk for private companies to explore
and exploit off-world resources. These havens would also be logical
places for space ports and large population concentrations. Meanwhile,
government strives to do all this while buying the max percentage of
the required services from contractors...

Tom Merkle

(Tom Merkle) wrote in message . com...
(garfangle) wrote in message . com...

Unless the backers of companies like Scaled Composites have some
special insight in rocketry that NASA and its contractors don't have,
then I can't see where the innovation is coming from. Even though
NASA may sometimes waste money, if there was a new technology that
could reduce costs of manned liftoff by a factor of 10 do you not
think they would be investigating it already?

This is a good point--but you're missing the big picture. There is no
one single 'new technology' that will reduce the costs of manned
liftoff. That's why the government is unable to develop a low cost
solution. You don't see where the innovation is coming from precisely
because you're looking for one big, single special technology. That's
not the way innovative engineering wins. Look at any example from any
field of engineering--you'll find that schemes that use some single
big advance in technology usually fail. It's too much to work with.
Winners that innovate use proven technology in new ways or novel
combinations. NASA's stuck right now because its political
requirements have forced it to 'jump over' suborbital development
straight to orbital development--it's just too big a leap for industry
to make in one hop, so NASA is currently forced to maintain its
arbitrary, pricier solutions because there's no industry base for
alternatives.

I am not saying that innovation has to just come from government
contracts. What I mean is that dupicating what has already been
proven and done seems to me a waste of time and money. We do not need
to confirm that rockets can lift people into suborbital space, at
whatever price point you are looking at, because it has already been
accomplished 40 years ago. Now, if the X-Prize was for some unique
effort, like developing composites for a "space elevator" then that
would be worth while, as it would be cutting edge and novel.


You can propose all you want. And indeed, I think carefully-drafted
legislation to endorse offworld land claims would be great. But I also
think it's not going to happen, not until there are squatters already
staking out their claims in an unofficial manner.

And how do you suppose the squatters get there? And who would
recognize them? And if governments refused to negotiate, well they
could just stay there and see if they could outlast their oxygen
tanks.

The squatters get there when they can afford to go on their own.
Anybody who wants what the squatters have will recognize them--or at
least have to deal with them. If the government decides to 'outlast
them,' odds are the squatters will happily set up camp and start
mining whatever resource they want, and then sell it, government
notwithstanding.

How can a handful of colonists assert any authority/independence when
they'd be completely dependent on Earth for the foreseeable future?



I applaud your investment of time and money, but IMHO there are better
ways to get what we all are looking for than this extraneous pursuit.
I want to get to space as much as you do, just I think there is a more
efficacous plan.

That efficacous plan being . . ?

Check out my original post.

Here's mine.
Personally I prefer the government to "open" new areas like Mars,
Moon, asteroids, etc. by 1. sending robotic surveyors 2. sending human
explorers to 'see what we can see' and 3. making government paid-for
manned 'safe havens' that reduce risk for private companies to explore
and exploit off-world resources. These havens would also be logical
places for space ports and large population concentrations. Meanwhile,
government strives to do all this while buying the max percentage of
the required services from contractors...


How is compatible with the X-prize?

My arguement is not that individuals can't pursue what the X-prize
represents. Whatever floats your boat. I am just making the analysis
that there might be a more fruitful approach to space exploration (not
to say I have all the ideas).

Ciao.