NASA has no money for its human-spaceflight plans. The private sector has plenty

http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14401165

by ryanb • 17 years ago

22 23 17 years ago

SamAtt3• 17 years ago

Personally I’d like to see NASA morph into an agency that supports the private sector somewhat in the vein of the FCC. Because there’s another problem out there that no one’s really talking about and that’s the fact that private investors are working with very little oversight right now. Not a big concern for people yet but the first time a private space craft explodes on national TV it will be (unless we prevent that from happening up front)

NASA has no money but they have a lot of experience and the backing of the Government. The private industry has a lot of money but no experience or backing. So have NASA provide regulations and act as an agent for collaboration between private firms while private industry takes on the expense of actually launching manned space missions.

georgekv• 17 years ago

How about more like the FAA?

SamAtt3• 17 years ago

That's what I meant :)

DannoHung• 17 years ago

I just don't see the point of putting humans in space unless we're going to use them to build something permanent.

Asteroid surveying would be an awesome goal for NASA, something where the unit cost is low, it can serve as testbeds for automation, propulsion, and science, and we may very well hit the jackpot and find rocks with high rare earth contents.

sp332• 17 years ago

80,000 people have signed up with Virgin Galactic for space tourism, including 100 people who have already paid $200,000 each for a single flight. http://science.howstuffworks.com/spaceshiptwo2.htm

alabut2• 17 years ago

What usually gets overlooked is that Virgin Galactic is only initially for space tourism. The larger goal is intercontinental travel, to connect various spaceports together through sub-orbital flights.

It's not on wikipedia anywhere, I watched a TED interview with Richard Branson while on a Virgin America flight and the vision of hopping in and out of the atmosphere for travel has stuck with me ever since:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_branson_s_life_at...

patio11• 17 years ago

find rocks with high rare earth contents

It wouldn't matter if you found a mythical space-goose which turned anything they touched into gold, you'd still lose money on the transport costs bringing the goose trash and returning with treasure.

skolor• 17 years ago

That depends on a few things. Specifically, if NASA is sufficiently far-sighted, finding sources of intra-solar resources which are easily accessible once in space could be viewed as a long term R&D investment. It may be massively expensive to try and use the resources now, but if NASA can find resources on asteroids, it becomes significantly easier to get funding to build and deploy equipment to harvest and use those materials without returning to earth with them.

jerf• 17 years ago

Earth -> Space is fundamentally expensive. Space -> Earth is not; there's a lot of tradeoffs available to you to cut down price, mostly in exchange for receiving the goods later. You can bring an moderately sized asteroid to us reasonably easily, if getting to space was easy itself.

(And that is how you do it; bring the resources to us. I don't know what we could do that would involve carting atoms into space, getting them space-blessed, then carting them back to Earth.)

DanielBMarkham2• 17 years ago

NASA should promote spaceflight and bolster technology innovations by offering tremendously huge prizes for companies that can overcome major obstacles, like lowering cost-to-orbit by a factor of a hundred.

They shouldn't be the space police, or the space bureaucracy, or the space experts.

If we were to reduce cost-to-orbit by a factor of a hundred, then you could launch satellites for a couple of hundred thousand dollars. You could have deep space telescopes for the cost of a new luxury airliner. It changes everything.

Whereas if we keep doing these one-off missions where we do this huge development effort and make no major breakthroughs, everything stays expensive for a very long time.

voidmain• 17 years ago

If you could lower cost-to-orbit by a factor of a hundred, you wouldn't need a NASA prize to make money!

Prizes can be a good idea, but not for things so spectacularly easy to monetize.

SamAtt3• 17 years ago

I'm not sure I see the incentive here. Follow my logic. A prize is valuable because it's something you couldn't afford yourself. If I offered $1 prize people probably wouldn't be too psyched about it because a dollar is something they could spare out of their own pocket.

The whole point of this article is that NASA doesn't have enough money to overcome the hurdles you refer to. So it stands to reason that companies would have to spend more to overcome the hurdles than the prizes themself would be worth.

Which is why I don't see how prizes would have any positive impact.

DanielBMarkham2• 17 years ago

By offering a prize, a large organization can "pay ahead" the cost of developing, testing, and implementing a new technology.

Look at it this way: let's assume it would cost the government $20 Billion to reduce cost-to-orbit by three-fold, say through the use of hybrid-magnetic launchers or some such. But that $20 Billion would take 20 years and dozens of missions.

Instead the agency could offer a $10 Billion prize for any company that had three successive launches at one-third the cost in the next three years. Each year after that the prize would increase by $1 Billion.

Now, instead of one technology, pursued by one agency, you have a dozen possible solutions pursued by a dozen organizations. At some point the prize money is paid out -- arguably much earlier than 20 years but who knows? It's definitely not going to cost any more money, and now you've decreased cost-to-orbit of every other mission you ever want to have. That means for every mission you have after the goal is reached, you've reduced launch costs by two-thirds.

Forever.

In addition, you're likely to end up with 3 or 4 technologies that all can reduce cost-to-orbit, all that are viable.

That's why reducing cost-to-orbit is such a critical goal. It's this huge productivity multiplier. Yes, you spend more now, but it makes all the other decisions easier (eventually). You quickly reach a point where lots of entities have the funds to do multiple missions using lots of new technologies -- a much better situation than continuing to pay more and more money for less and less return.

rbanffy• 17 years ago

I think prizes are not the way to go - the amounts of money would need to be staggering.

Offering guaranteed fixed-price contracts like they plan to do with SpaceX is seemingly the best way to go. NASA still has to resupply the ISS, move crews and cargo and put spacecraft in orbit. By making companies bid on tasks they need done they will induce the development of the technologies required and ultimately lower their own (and our) costs.

fatdog789• 17 years ago

It only costs a few hundred thousand dollars to launch a few satellites. Deep space telescopes do cost less than a luxury airliner. (The Dreamliner and Airbus Monsterplane both cost in excess of $250M/per -- and that doesn't include customizations). We have NASA to thank for that -- without a government agency willing to shell out hundreds of billions of dollars on research, this sort of stuff would cost hundreds of millions of dollars per launch.

NASA also isn't the space police. It is the space bureaucracy, and the space experts agency, primarily because the private sector didn't care enough about space to do any of this stuff itself.

NASA exists because of the failure of the private sector.

But prizes are a good idea -- it's more than time for the private sector to get into the game.

wlievens• 17 years ago

While you're right, you're talking about the past 40 years. I think the post parent is talking about the next 40 years.

gamble• 17 years ago

For cargo, yes. But humans? NASA has spent decades trying to make space travel safe, and the shuttle is still one of the most dangerous ways to travel on a per-journey basis. NASA doesn't have to worry about turning a profit either.

It will be interesting to see what happens to space tourism after the first fatal crash...

oconnor0• 17 years ago

Perhaps the same thing that happens after a fatal airplane or automobile crash.

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

But other than tourism and rapid transit (noted above, and not inconsiderable), what does private business have to gain in the short-to-medium term?

I'm thinking of the history of sailing and later aerial travel. It was expensive and risky, but this was considered worthy of investment because there were known destinations and thus opportunities for the procurement of fabulous wealth.

By comparison, space looks rather barren. There is commercial gain in launching satellites which allow us to communicate or observe things on earth more easily, but we've more-or-less automated that. Moving to the moon or Mars would be cool, but the moon is a total desert and Mars and Venus aren't exactly welcoming either - terraforming would be cool but is a truly humongous undertaking. Meantime, it's not like we see lots of asteroids zipping around bulging with desirable rare minerals.

I want to love the idea, but I don't really see where the business model is - the number of people who need the speed offered by suborbital travel is really low, and we're quite a ways off from showing how it would be cheaper than atmospheric flight. Seems to me that a space elevator which did away with the need for expensive rocketry would be a much more attractive investment opportunity.

EDIT: to clarify, I think private sector + space = win. I'm just not sure where the human spaceflight is a really big opportunity. The article seems to suggest that the best return would come from even cheaper satellite launching.

jsz0• 17 years ago

I completely agree. I think we're in for a very long wait. We over achieved getting into space and landing on the moon so quickly. (barely 50 years after air travel was a viable technology) I don't see a private industry for space travel unless a few things happen:

1) Earth's resources are depleted to the point where we need to harvest them from another planet. The situation would have to be VERY bad for us to get to that point. More likely than not it would be another dark ages for most of humanity with private space travel extracting valuable resources for the extremely rich & powerful.

2) Contact with intelligent life. It seems certain now this will not be in our own solar system so this raises the bar on the technology private industry would have to develop to travel so far. Very likely it would span the lifetimes of several generations of humans traveling to even a nearby solar system.

3) Over population on Earth becomes such a problem that a massive number of people are driven to taking the huge risk of re-locating to some underground colony on Mars. If you had 100 or 200 million people willing to relocate to Mars there would actually be a viable business model there I bet. (kind of similar to what happened with immigration to America early in the last century. It was expensive, dangerous, and life wasn't really that much better when you got there but the alternative was just so bad people were willing to take the chance)

So realistically I think we're probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of years away from the standard sci-fi dream of accessible human space exploration. LEO flights could be a profitable niche in the short term.

mhb• 17 years ago

Bill Stone says "I'm going to the moon -- who's with me (TED video):

http://blog.ted.com/2008/08/archive_bill_st.php

NASA has no money for its human-spaceflight plans. The private sector has plenty

Related Stories