A
Short History of
Private Space Development The NewSpace alternative route to space... (Under construction)
In its successful trek to the X PRIZE, the suborbital
SpaceShipOne from Scaled
Composites
became the first privately built, owned, and operated
manned vehicle to reach space.
Alt.space, NewSpace, entrepreneurial
space, and other lables have been used to describe
approaches to space development that different significantly
from that taken by NASA and the mainstream aerospace
industry. In this section we give an overview of the
history of unconventional approaches to developing space.
NewSpace does not have a hard, fast definition.
It tends to be one of those "we know it when we
see it" sort of labels. However, if a company,
or perhaps a "skunkworks" type of project
within a mainstream company, possesses at least three
or four of the following characteristics, it would certainly
fall under the NewSpace category:
Humans in space
Although a particular project may not directly involve
human spaceflight, most NewSpace companies see their
technology as helping to lay the groundwork towards
the long term goal of enabling large numbers of people
to go into space.
Low cost focus A NewSpace company focuses intensely on minimzing
the cost of whatever space hardware or service that
it produces. NewSpace companies also tend to pursue
markets such as space tourism that will involve much
higher usage rates than traditional space markets
and so they will achieve lower costs through economies
of scale.
Low Costs Will Pay Off
NewSpace companies follow a strategy for space development
that holds that lower prices for products and services
will lead eventually to much bigger markets and much
bigger payoffs in the long run compared to simply
trying to raise prices on today's static market.
Incremetal Development
Follow the model of other technologies such as computer
chips and LCD displays. Start with systems of limited
capability but with markets that can provide a profit
and thus pay for the development necessary to make
the next step up in capability. Over time this can
have a tremendous pay off as hardware improvements
are compounded and markets expand. For example, it
is hoped that suborbital space tourism will pay for
the development of increasingly reliable and safe
rocket vehicle systems that are cheap to operate.
These lessons will then apply to the next generations
of vehicles that will eventually reach orbit.
Consumer Markets
Pursues commercial and broad consumer markets, e.g.
space tourism. This sort of high rate market will
also lead to lower costs through economies of scale.
Operations are key
A Space Shuttle can get to space and back with a big
crew and lots of cargo but it takes about ten thousand
people to get it ready to fly again. NewSpace companies
hold that the operational costs of a system are more
important than achieving maximum performance. For
example, it may be worth sacrificing some performance
in a rocket engine and accepting a reduced payload
to orbit if it leads to significant improvements in
reliability, reusability, and maintenance of the overall
system.
Innovation
A NewSpace company might use innovative new technologies
that will lead to low cost, robust space systems.
Or a company might simply combine currently available,
"cheap-off-the-shelf" (COTS) technologies
in an innovative manner that provides a new and highly
capable system at lower costs.
Small teams
NewSpace companies maintain a tight-ship structure
with minimal bureacracy and overhead. (E.g. by avoiding
cost-plus contracts they do not need the army of accountants
and book-keepers to respond to the enormous amount
of red tape required by the government client.)
Fixed-price only
There's no rule that NewSpace companies cannot work
for government clients but they insist on fixed-price
contracts rather than the standard cost-plus
contracts, which have contributed greatly to making
space hardware so terrifically expensive.
Commercial space development is, of
course, nothing new. Since the beginning of the Space
Age we have seen the creation and steady growth
of a vibrant commercial space industry. The first communications
satellites were launched in the 1960s. By the 1970s,
comsats and the businesses that they enabled,
such as low cost long distance telephone calls and the
distribution of television programming to cable TV companies,
created a commercial space industry valued in the tens
of billions of dollars. In the 1980s and 1990s new services
arose such as direct-to-home satellite TV that expanded
the space industry by many more billions of dollars
in annual revenues. The current decade brought the successful
introduction of satellite radio to the US market.
In addition there are many successful businesses developed
around GPS
and remote
sensing satellite services. See the Space
Business section for more about these conventional
space businesses.
Human spaceflight related businesses, however,
have been very slow to develop. The extremely high cost
both for access to space and for operating there have
severely retarded the development of such an industry.
As indicated in the above section, NewSpace companies
make the cost problem their main focus and attack it
by doing things differently from the way NASA and the
conventional aerospace companies have purused space
development.
Examples of Low Cost
Space Development
It's one thing to claim that space development costs
can be significantly reduced, it is another to demonstrate
it in real life. Here are some examples that provide
solid empirical evidence that doing aerospace in a NewSpace
manner really can lead to big decreases in development
costs and similar reductions in prices to customers.
Genesis I - Bigelow
Aerospace
Bigelow Aerospace obtained the rights to the Transhab
inflatable spacecraft technology from NASA after the
agency shut down the program as instructed by Congress.
From roughly 2000 to 2006, Bigelow
Aerospace carried out an intense testing and development
program that greatly improved on that technology and
made it suitable for spaceflight. The company built
a sizeable infrastructure that included large test
facilities and assembly buildings. In the summer of
2006 BA successfully launched the Genesis I prototype
to orbit on a Russian Dnepr rocket. The company is
currently waiting to launch the Genesis II prototype
in January of 2007. It did all of this for just $75M.
Such a program easily would have cost a factor of
ten more if it had been done either as a NASA internal
project or via contract with a major aerospace firm.
SpaceShipOne
The SS1 project cost around $30M. It is taken generally
for granted that this is at least a factor of ten
or twenty less that it would have cost for NASA or
a mainstream aerospace company to accomplish.
Lunar
Prospector
This project (see description
in the Space Activism section) began as a private
project run by space activists. It nearly got launched
for just a few million dollars but they could not
obtain the contributions necessary to arrange a launch
on a Russian vehicle. Eventually it became a NASA
program managed by Lockheed-Martin. Even so, Alan
Binder reported that the initial low cost approach
allowed it be successful for three or four times less
than the projects that competed for the Discovery
program contract.
DC-X,
DC-XA - Reusable rocket vehicle demonstrator
This project, led by astronaut Pete
Conrad, took place within a mainstream company
(McDonald-Douglas) and was funded by the government
(first the military and then NASA). However, it was
allowed to use a 1950s X-project style management
approach with a very small, tightly focused team and
flexible procurement techniques. In doing so it successfully
fulfilled its goals of demonstrating reusability and
fast-turnaround of a LOX/LH2
rocket vehicle within a very limited budget. The management,
as well as those who have run the numbers through
NASA cost model programs, all say that this project
cost at least a factor of ten less that if it had
been run according to standard NASA/aerospace industry
procurement and management procedures.
Furthermore, it is commonly reported by NewSpace companies
that when they obtain price quotes for components from
mainstream companies, the prices are several times what
they obtain from alternative sources or by building
the components themselves.
For further discussion of high launch costs, see Rand
Simberg's article The
Path Not Taken - The New Atlantis - Sept.04, which
lays out clearly the reasons why it currently costs
so much to go to space, why this high cost is not due
to any fundamental laws of physics or economics, and
how the costs can be brought down significantly.
The XCOR
EZ-Rocket demonstrated that its liquid fueled rocket engine
could operate safely and reliably over multiple flights.
The vehicle
became the inspiration for the Rocket
Racing League.
Private
Spaceflight Development Timeline
Below we give a rough
timeline for private spaceflight projects that sought
to expand usage of rockets and space far beyond what
government programs were doing.
Early Efforts
Rocket
clubs and other non-governmental organizations
and individuals in the pre-WW II period led development
of rocketry.
Rocket
mail - Various efforts to use rockets for
fast delivery of mail started took place during the
pre-war period but never came to practical routine
use. Probably the last attempt to develop a rocket
mail system was a test
for the US Post Office in 1959.
1960s
AMSAT - Birth of the Nanosat
Based primarily within the amateur radio community,
the AMSAT
program began not long after Sputnik reached orbit.
AMSAT quickly made major contributions to the development
of communications satellites and continues so today.
They have been leaders in the movement to prove that
small satellites can carry out very useful and important
tasks.
See the Satellite
Building and the Space
Radio sections for resources dealing with both AMSAT
and student satellite programs.
Other
1970s
Project Harvest Moon - Committee
for the Future
Robert Truax & Project Private
Enterprise
Truax developed his first rockets in the 1930s and
continued working in rocketry up into this decade. He
led several missile programs in the Navy and Air Force
until he retired in 1959. He then formed Truax Engineering
and worked in a number of space and missile programs
in the 1960s.
He was always keen on developing low cost access to
space and came up with numerous designs to achieve that.
He particularly focused on sea launched systems such
as the Sea Dragon and Excalibur.
He obtained general public attention when he built
the steam rocket that powered the X-1
Skycycle for daredevil Evel
Knievel's famoust jump over the Snake River Canyon.
During the 1970s he developed probably the first suborbital
space tourist vehicle, which he called the VolksRocket.
It would take one person to 50 miles altitude using
four 1000 pound thrust surplus vernier engines from
the Atlas program. However, his Project Private Enterprise
was never able to raise the million dollars that he
needed to build one: Be
Your Own Astronaut (If Bob Truax Gets His Way) - by
Paul Siegler - L5 News Vol. 3 Num. 4 April 1978 (pdf
1.1MB).
Civilian Astronauts Corps in 1997 - the organizers
of this project tried to raise money via $2000 contributions
from the public with the chance of later flying on
the Advent. They could not reach a sum sufficient
to pursue the project and the money was returned to
contributers.
