Beal Aerospace and NASA

Beal Aerospace's web site has quite a condemnation of NASA from Beal
himself accussing NASA of attempting to monopolize commercial space
industry. Is this just sour grapes from a sore loser or is he
correct? Knowledgeble opinions appreciated.

David OHara

(Parallax) wrote in message . com...
Beal Aerospace's web site has quite a condemnation of NASA from Beal
himself accussing NASA of attempting to monopolize commercial space
industry. Is this just sour grapes from a sore loser or is he
correct? Knowledgeble opinions appreciated.


Mr. Beal's rant never made sense to me. He was compaining
about NASA's then-newly-annouced Space Launch Initiative
(SLI), which was intended to develop launch technologies
that would eventually result in a shuttle replacement. SLI
was a NASA/government initiative that would not have produced
a commercially-competitive launch vehicle, as Mr. Beal
claimed. It would, however, have siphoned funding to Boeing,
Lockheed Martin, and the like - companies that Mr. Beal thought
to be competitors for the same space launch business that his
rocket was designed to win.

The truth is that the commercial satellite market was in the
process of collapsing when Beal closed shop. The low earth
orbit market, especially, totally collapsed with the bankruptcy
filings of Iridium, Globalstar, Orbcomm, etc. This so-called
"little-LEO" market had provided the basis for some wildly
overly optimistic launch forcasts during the late 1990s. With
the collapse, suddenly the world was awash in launch vehicle
overcapacity. Yet another new rocket was the last thing the
market needed. Several new all-commercial launcher efforts,
including Roton, Kistler, and Beal, shut down. It seems more
likely to me that the real reason Mr. Beal closed shop was that
he saw the writing on the wall at about the same time that his
development efforts would have been needing a major infusion of
cash to assemble the first flight vehicles.

In the end, SLI faltered and was restructured in scaled down
form as today's Orbital Space Plane program. Boeing and Lockheed
Martin, the "competitors" Mr. Beal compained about, found that
their new Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles were not competitive
for commercial launch business (neither has won a single new
commercial launch contract this year). Instead, both focused on
government work while participating in international ventures that
effectively funneled commercial launches to Russia's lower-cost
Proton or the Ukrainian/Russian Sea Launch Zenit. Europe's
Arianespace continued to dominate the commercial launch market.

Launch prices have fallen significantly during this downturn.
A company recently contracted for a Proton launch at about
$49 million, for example. Previously, equivalent Ariane and
EELV launches had been selling for $70-100 million.

- Ed Kyle