how come companies aren’t trying already? is it just the vast expense or is the industry regulated in some other way?

There are actually quite a number of space “entrepreneurs” out there – but they seem to have a lot of difficulty raising investment capital, and many blame NASA (indirectly at least – investors think NASA’s already doing it all so why invest in a private competitor – and of course a big investor trying to assess the feasibility of a private space effort will likely talk to NASA “experts” before investing…). Regulatory issues are pretty cumbersome too.

Actually, you have to distinguish the cargo market from the human launch market. In cargo (i.e. satellite launches) the competitive environment is reasonably stiff, though not exactly healthy with the recent decline in launch demand. And the competition is international, with the Russians and Europeans doing much better than US companies lately. A few of the new entrepreneurs (Elon Musk with SpaceX for example) as well as bigger companies like Orbital Sciences, are trying to grab some of that market share back for the US. The classification of all space hardware as “munitions” under the ‘ITAR’ regulations makes it very hard for US companies to compete at anything less than the full launch platform level.

For human launches there are only two current launch platforms – the Shuttle and Russia’s Soyuz. China may have a third soon, and there seems to be some motion among Europe, Japan, and possibly India to follow up over the next decade or so. The big US space companies (Boeing and Lockheed) have their spiffy new expendable boosters (Atlas V and Delta IV) they would like to get rated for human flight, launching a payload consisting of some sort of capsule or “orbital space plane”. Meanwhile a couple of dozen small operations are trying to do suborbital flight competing for the X prize.

So there’s a lot happening – which most of the media (and most investors, unfortunately) ignore when talking about the shuttle – with some reason: shuttle budget is around $4 billion/year – few of the new competitors have even a tiny fraction of that to spend…

it’s a matter of what your tradeoffs are – a competitive marketplace results in the safety level the market will bear. One of the points in the report I believe was that NASA runs things with almost no safety margin, while attempting through sheer brain power to never ever slip up – a commercial endeavor would be pushed by cost assessments to build in the possibility of failures, and handle them – rather than having no repair capability on board, for example. But I agree that statement from the SFF seems a little odd.

As with airplanes, or cars. The cost of safety is imposed on the company that makes them, because without the regulations, “the market” wouldn’t push the companies toward safety. A few companies may make safety a selling point (think volvo) but low prices rule the day in a free market.

the market provides the amount of saftey that is demanded by the customer. Each individual decides for themselves the premium they are willing to pay for their own safety. Unless you believe that individuals don’t value their saftey, which makes me wonder why I see car ads promoting their saftey features.

We use that little statement a number of times and it always means roughly the same thing.  I can’t speak for the whole Foundation, but I can explain how I interpret it if that is any help.

A competitive market place will generally produce evolution in a product or service.  Suppliers are motivated to improve some part of the product or the process that generates it because they will either be able to lower their costs, differentiate their product, market it at a higher price, or some combination of the above.

Products that harm their users are a hard sell, but it is still possible.  Products that harm their users tend to get the attention of regulators with very little push from a few grumbling citizens.  Products that harm their users but show evolution toward safer iterations may be allowed to continue and self-police, though, if the evolution is fast enough.

What I expect to see in a healthy marketplace is engineering iterations that evolve a product or service.  The more solutions get tried, the better they will get on many fronts.  If safety is an expectation demanded by the customers, the engineers will evolve in that direction.  If price is the primary expectation, then safety will be a secondary concern, but it will never fade away.  Regulators introduce operational costs through required insurance, licensing, and many other forms, so suppliers will have to evolve to cope.

Does that help clear things up?  This is my perspective on it, of course.  Sometimes you have to live these things to see what we mean.  Unfortunately, it’s hard to describe those lessons in a press release.

There are space businesses trying a variety of things including stuff that might surprise you.  I keep a list of the companies of which I am aware that have a mostly space focus to their business model and the press releases they send out.  You can check up on them if you like at http://www.space-frontier.org/FFO/special/press_releases

Also, anyone knowing of any companies that should be on my list is most welcome to kibitz as long as they tell me who to add.  If there are press releases I’ve missed, let me know that too and I’ll add them or make it possible for the kibitzer to add them.  8)

Basically I agree with this as far as orbital flight is concerned — but I’d want to be sure there actually are firms committed to investing, and customers with not only the desire but the funds to pay for launches, before cancelling the only manned space program we now have. There is a great deal wrong with NASA, but there are times when “the only game in town” is preferable to no game at all.

To say that “government should never again design, buy or operate manned spacecraft, any more than it should operate airlines or build 747s” is to fail to distinguish between different types of manned of space flight. The trouble now is that we have no higher aim than to make brief trips into orbit. If there were a public commitment to a Mars landing and/or to a permanent moon colony, there would be progress just as there was during the Apollo era, and there would be a much larger number of people devoting their best efforts to the project, personally dedicated to making sure that it does not fail, than there have ever been for the shuttle. And much as I favor private enterprise, and feel that it’s the appropriate way to fund anything that can be expected to offer reasonable hope of financial return within the lifetime of its investors, I don’t think the initial trips to Mars will come in this category. We will probably need government funding of exploratory missions until such time as the inhabitants of moon or orbiting colonies have gotten rich enough, through marketing of solar energy and extraterrestrial materials, to pay for more space exploration on their own.

As to the safety issue, there are two problems. On one hand, NASA’s mismanagement and lack of attention to safety is inexcusable (but, unfortunately, all too typical of anything run by the government). On the other hand, the public’s expectations for the same or better safety record for space flight than for airline travel is unrealistic. In the early days of aviation there were no such expectations; if there had been, we would never have reached the stage of building 747s. We can and should eliminate accidents caused by incompetence and carelessness, but we must not hold back progress in space because of unwillingness to risk human life — exploration and innovation is dangerous! It always has been and always will be. The fact that explorers, well aware of the risk, sometimes lose their lives in pursuit of a goal should not be an excuse for losing sight of the goal, which too often, nowadays, it seems to be.

This should be a good time to secure funding for investment into the space elevator

Just last weekend I got a chance to sit and chat for an extended time with Michael Laine of LiftPort. They have a big challenge ahead of them, but they also seem to have an excellent plan and committed team, and experience from a number of past ventures. The carbon nanotube materials seem to be coming along, and the biggest obstacle right now, he mentioned, is powering the lifters – the laser approaches they were looking at seem to be much more expensive than they had hoped, but Jordin Kare is on board to help now, so they may try some new ideas.

thanks for the replies, that’s lots of reading material :-)

The reason I asked the question was that I’ve just read Stephen Baxter’s ‘Time’ in which he hints at vast amounts of red-tape regarding any kind of launch attempts…or was that just creative license?

I’m looking forward to the day the X-Prize is won. I think it’ll inspire a lot of people.

Thanks,
I misplaced my LiftPort bookmark and I couldn’t remember the name

There IS plenty of red tape.  I could go on and on and on and … but you get the idea.

If you want to know details about the red tape, I’ll share them elsewhere, but I don’t want to ‘leave a t*rd’ here on this wonderful science site.  It wouldn’t be fair.  8)

In general, compared to most developmental technologies (and space travel is certainly still in development), space flight has had a very good record as far as safety is concerned. Compared to the number of flights that have been conducted, the casualty rate is rather low, especially compared to something like the Russian space program, which has been even caused the death of one of its chief designers.
It’s absolutely amazing that so few people were killed and injured during the early (Mercury -> Apollo) era, where the technology was simplistic, almost completely untested, with no real backup systems, or rescue systems if something went wrong. (Of course there’s still no rescue system)
At some point in an intrinsically dangerous endevour like this, we have to grit our teeth, accept that there are going to be some casualties, and get on with it (this does not mean that we should accept unneccesary risks of course).

It doesn’t help that NASA has been struggling with lowering budgets, when the cost of the expeditions and hardware has been increasing. they haven’t even been able to afford to build a new space craft (despite various viable designs) since the eighties. Would we expect any other emergent design to last this long?

Of course, no investigation is omplete without the TPS Reports

The problem I see with the ‘only game in town’ approach is that while that game continues to run it effectively competes with the other potential games. It is quite difficult to compete with an entity that is not profit motivated, can write its own statute waivers, and has big State senators backing it.  There are other options available and nearly available, but they will never be used even by a government agency with a need to access space because they loose in the competion.  Eliminate the big game and the others WILL step up.  It won’t happen the other way around because no sane investor will support it.

Are our little trips up to orbit REALLY worth keeping the only game in town running?

I understand people’s fears that nothing will step in to fill the void, but some risks are worth it.

> Are our little trips up to orbit REALLY worth keeping the only game in town running?

I agree that they are not. What we must be sure of is not to lose what we have invested so far in the training of astronauts and other NASA employees — we lost too many good people to other careers when Apollo was cancelled, and if the shuttle were cancelled without initiation of a more advanced program, we would lose the rest of them and have to start later from scratch in order to get to Mars. Maintenance of the expertise is what we must keep it running for. Those people have to work; they cannot just wait around while private industry gears up to provide jobs.

But of course the shuttle shouldn’t have been NASA’s only manned-flight game for this long a time! The best, and overdue, course would be to commit to a Mars landing and/or establishment of a moon colony, and at the same time cancel the shuttle, so that public funding would be advancing human progress into space instead of competing with private industry by providing access to orbit.

..though only because none of the private ventures will have to deal with the aging of their equipment like NASA.

Columbia was on mission 28 and over 20 years old. I don’t know about you, but I don’t expect my car to last twenty years, much less give me 28 round trips between Miami, FL, and Nome, AK… and did I mention I have to light it on fire when I cross the Canadian border on the way back? ;D

I think we’d be better served by a series of specialized craft each designed to do a smaller range of things and do it well. The shuttle was designed with too broad a brushstroke and while it was capable of doing many things, it did not do any of them very well. Autonomous supply rockets for ISS bound cargo. Another craft devoted to ferrying personnel or other delicate good. Any open up the supply and mantenance (and booking) of these craft to anyone interested.

NASA would still get the big sexy projects, like Mars or any plans for semi-permanent settling of the Moon, simply because they do not offer much in the way of a profit motive. These types of project could, however recapture the public’s interest in space exploration, something that no microgravity science experiment is *ever* going to do.