Space Access Update #89 8/25/99
Copyright 1999 by Space Access Society
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Stories This Issue:
- Sixth Anniversary of DC-X First Flight
- Congress On Break Till September - Space Funding Bills Status
- Miscellany - Rotary Rocket Reprieve, Kistler Gets Funding & Moves
Forward, NASA STAS Process Underway Again, Daimler-Chrysler and
Boeing Reveal Reusable Launch Plans, GAO Report On X-33 Overruns
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Editorial: Sixth Anniversary of DC-X's One Small Hop
On August 18th, 1993, a forty-foot boilerplate traffic-cone of a
rocket rose a hundred-fifty feet above the New Mexico desert,
translated three hundred feet sideways, then came down to a
precision-controlled landing. Not much of a flight - it was
described at the time as a "bunny-hop" - but this was still a
revolutionary milestone, for a couple of reasons:
One, it was a reusable rocket, designed to be flown and flown again
in days rather than months, by a ground crew of dozens rather than
thousands, from a site set up from a few tractor-trailers rather
than a huge industrial complex - all key factors in getting space
launch costs down from their traditional astronomical levels.
Two, this had been accomplished in less than three years from go-
ahead on less than sixty million dollars to first flight - radically
faster and cheaper than the aerospace establishment had come to
consider possible for such projects.
If the original DC-X/DC-Y plan had not already grounded hard on the
shoals of politics (SDIO imprudently added to DC-Y a (grossly
premature) 25,000 lb payload requirement, leading the Congress to
truncate the program at DC-X), we would likely by now have seen
flight test of an aimed-at-orbital "X" DC-Y, one with no payload but
test gear (and test pilots?) and no purpose but exploring what
affordable reusable rocket spaceflight takes.
We would by now very likely be a year or two into development of
practical low-cost reusable space transports, rather than a year
short of, fingers crossed that nothing breaks, demonstrating high-
cost single-stage-to-Utah reusable rocket flight.
Oh well, it's water over the dam now. We are still better off than
we were before DC-X. It changed perceptions radically - reusable
rockets are now widely seen as practical, with the debate moved on
to who pays and what flavor(s) to build. Low-cost rapid-paced
experimental aerospace projects are once again accepted as doable,
though the funding balance between a handful of these and the
contractor-in-every-district megaprojects is still not what we'd
like to see - NASA still hasn't figured out that sponsoring one
"winner" in each market segment now is a way to pay monopoly prices
later. We think it's obvious that a policy of more DC-X class, X-34
class RLV concept demonstrators, from a variety of vendors large and
small, would pay off big in reduced launch costs down the line.
It may have been three steps forward, two steps back since DC-X
first flew, but that beats the heck out of no progress at all. So
spare a thought this summer day for the little rocket that could -
and help us get more such projects funded. Which brings us to...
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Congress On Break Till September - Space Funding Bills Status
As of Friday August 6th, Congress went into recess and out of DC
until after Labor Day. Here's the current status of the various
funding bills we're interested in this year.
- The House passed its NASA Authorization a while ago, with some
very good language on our proposed Future-X "X-Ops" program plus $30
million new money authorized for it. (An authorization bill is an
officially approved shopping list; money isn't actually provided to
a program until it's "appropriated".) The Senate, meanwhile, almost
certainly won't pass a NASA Authorization this year.
- The Defense Authorization conference took place just before the
recess; Space Maneuver Vehicle was authorized at up to $35 million.
- The House and Senate have both passed their Defense
Appropriations, the House with nothing for Space Maneuver Vehicle
(SMV), the Senate with $25 million. We'll be pushing for the Senate
number when the House-Senate conference comes. (SMV is either a
second NASA X-37 or a first USAF X-40B, depending on who you ask -
the AF people apparently need enough internal differences from the
X-37 that a separate designator might make sense, but both would be
built by the X-37 contractor with pretty much the same basic
airframe. Either way, it's a very useful reusable upper stage with
non-toxic storable fuels, with considerable potential for extended
operations in orbit before reentry, landing, and reuse.)
- The House Appropriations Committee marked up their NASA
(HUD/VA/Independent Agencies) Appropriations bill with a $900
million dollar cut (down from a $1.3 billion cut in subcommittee),
the majority of it from space sciences, causing a considerable stir.
Advanced space launch work had already come down $150 million this
year from last, largely a reflection of X-33 being past its funding
peak, and was not further reduced. Future-X stayed level at $30
million. Given the massive cuts elsewhere in this version of the
funding bill, no new reductions in advanced space launch is a
victory of sorts - it's harder for them to further cut areas where
there's active pressure for an increase. Thanks, y'all.
We must emphasize that this House NASA appropriation with its large
cuts is an interim result, a side-effect of the tax-cut/budget-caps
fight between Congress and the White House. Chances are that fight
will be settled in some sort of compromise in the next month or so,
with a significant part of the NASA cuts restored and with some room
for minor increases in high priority areas. We are working hard to
see that Future-X X-Ops is treated as such a priority - this year.
- The Senate still hasn't started the process on their NASA
(HUD/VA) Appropriation; the sequence would be markup by the Senate
Appropriations Committee's HUD/VA subcommittee, then markup by the
full Committee, then a Senate floor vote. The Senate seems to be
holding off to see how things shake out in the budget-caps/tax-cut
fight with the White House. Our guess is that, if a compromise is
reached in the budget fight, the NASA budget fixes will happen in
the Senate HUD/VA Appropriation and the House will then accede to
them in conference. (You self-starters out there, work Senate
HUD/VA appropriators to add $50 million for NASA Future-X X-Ops.)
Once Congress gets back in session, things will start happening fast
- stand by for political action alerts on the Senate HUD/VA markups,
on the Defense Appropriations conference, and on the HUD/VA
Appropriations conference. Meanwhile, a good summer to all of you!
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Miscellany
- Rotary Rocket Reprieve
Gary Hudson confirmed the other day that Rotary Rocket has gotten
financial backing from an undisclosed source (space.com implies it's
Tom Clancy) at least through completion of the ATV "Aerial Test
Vehicle" flight test program. We also think we've put two and two
together regarding Rotary's plans for engining the space test
version of their Roton reusable launcher with a derivative of NASA's
"Fastrac" cheap-but-too-heavy engine - Space America, of Huntsville
Alabama, recently won a NASA contract for just under a million
dollars to develop a propellant-cooled nozzle for Fastrac, much
lighter than the initial low-cost ablatively cooled nozzle.
- Kistler Gets Funding & Moves Forward
George Mueller in an interview with Aviation Week Online last month
said that Kistler had obtained funding from Saudi Arabian sources
that would see the company through flight test of their two-stage
reusable K-1 launcher. We've seen no official confirmation of this
since, but if it's true, it would also set into motion previously-
negotiated conditional backing from structures subcontractor
Northrop Grumman and from a Taiwanese-led investor consortium.
Indications are that Kistler's plans to conduct test flights out of
Australia and commercial operations out of Nevada are moving
forward.
- NASA STAS Process Underway Again
The week before last, NASA held a short-notice meeting in Washington
DC. The subject was continuation of the Space Transportation
Architecture Study (STAS) process, the effort to define just what
NASA should do next in light of an aging and expensive Shuttle
fleet. Another round of STAS meetings is taking place this week in
the Los Angeles area. So far, we've seen some hopeful signs - the
various RLV startups were recruited strongly to attend the DC
meeting, one of the draft papers NASA passed around was "Crew/Cargo
Transfer Vehicle Preliminary Requirements" indicating one of the
more sensible options is still alive, and trial balloons were
floated about steering some funding to the RLV startups. It's
possible that the ankle-biting we've been doing these last few
months is having some effect. More when we know more.
- Daimler-Chrysler and Boeing Reveal Reusable Launch Plans
This is relatively old news, weeks in the case of Boeing and a
couple months in the case of Daimler-Chrysler Aerospace (DASA), but
we think there's an interesting trend here. Both companies have
expressed official interest in doing next-generation reusable
launchers on a commercial basis in the coming decade, and both are
looking at incremental approaches to technically conservative two-
stage reusable designs. While neither aerospace giant has made a
major commitment yet, it looks like reduced-cost reusable launch is
beginning to get commercially respectable.
- GAO Reports X-33 Cost Overruns
The government's General Accounting Office has been looking into
X-33 for a while now, and apparently their report is now in. We
hear, in addition to the obvious - X-33 is behind schedule and has
technical problems - that GAO thinks that actual NASA cost for X-33
has grown to almost one and a quarter billion dollars, 30% higher
than the nominal NASA cost-share of $941 million. So much for
putting all your eggs into one big basket - we said at the time and
we'll say again that multiple awards for smaller less all-
encompassing projects would have been a far better use of the funds
available. X-33 is what we've got, and it should be finished and
flown (with NO more additional public money) but in future NASA
should heed this lesson: Award monopoly projects and you'll get
monopoly results. Fostering multiple competitors is far better in
the long run - cheaper for NASA as competition drives down launch
costs, and better for the country as a whole as space industry
growth rates climb.
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Space Access Society
http://www.space-access.org
space.access@space-access.org
"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"
- Robert A. Heinlein