So the blogosphere is getting all worked up about an article run by Space News and authored by two former senior European Space Agency launcher officials that attacks sub-orbital tourism and hopes for commercial orbital transport
Hyperbola stresses the word former as it is clear that ESA's leadership does not share these views. The organisation has a policy on space tourism that could see ESA provide training, the agency has managed European Union studies about sub-orbital transport and the agency has even gone as far as helping prospective companies with their business plans and declaring that sub-orbit travel has a low (relatively speaking) carbon footprint. Former European astronauts like space tourism too
Hyperbola stresses the word former as it is clear that ESA's leadership does not share these views. The organisation has a policy on space tourism that could see ESA provide training, the agency has managed European Union studies about sub-orbital transport and the agency has even gone as far as helping prospective companies with their business plans and declaring that sub-orbit travel has a low (relatively speaking) carbon footprint. Former European astronauts like space tourism too
The two authors of that Space News article may be chuckling to themselves at the outcry they have caused or they may actually feel so strongly about the subject matter that the word hoax is, for them, a polite reference to the new industry
This blogger got to feel the strength of anti-space tourism sentiment in Europe at a conference awhile back when on a discussion panel. A member of the audience who is a senior technical official at an ESA centre called suborbital travel "trivial" and a French space agency representative, who was also on the panel, had some harsh words as well
It is hard for people to accept the claims of New Space when they have been working, sometimes for decades, in an industry that has launched much into orbit and never brought the cost down. And in this Jon Amos' BBC Spaceman blog we now see even Elon Musk is talking about $100 million launches for the as yet unlaunched Falcon 9
The argument this blogger had put forward is that the frequency of suborbital trips generates the revenue and wider business confidence that leads to the markets investing. This in turn leads to a virtuous circle of suborbital improvement, leading to point to point services, with further improvement, and finally reaching an orbital capability that will in part be reusable
Perhaps now we have seen significant private investment in space tourism the reaction to such an argument will be calmer but whether it is or it isn't don't write ESA or the European space industry off quite yet as a hot bed of anti-commercial space protagonists. For many on our ancient continent change can only come slowly even if it involves high technology
And Hyperbola will have more on European suborbital studies in the not too distant future anyway
This blogger got to feel the strength of anti-space tourism sentiment in Europe at a conference awhile back when on a discussion panel. A member of the audience who is a senior technical official at an ESA centre called suborbital travel "trivial" and a French space agency representative, who was also on the panel, had some harsh words as well
It is hard for people to accept the claims of New Space when they have been working, sometimes for decades, in an industry that has launched much into orbit and never brought the cost down. And in this Jon Amos' BBC Spaceman blog we now see even Elon Musk is talking about $100 million launches for the as yet unlaunched Falcon 9
The argument this blogger had put forward is that the frequency of suborbital trips generates the revenue and wider business confidence that leads to the markets investing. This in turn leads to a virtuous circle of suborbital improvement, leading to point to point services, with further improvement, and finally reaching an orbital capability that will in part be reusable
Perhaps now we have seen significant private investment in space tourism the reaction to such an argument will be calmer but whether it is or it isn't don't write ESA or the European space industry off quite yet as a hot bed of anti-commercial space protagonists. For many on our ancient continent change can only come slowly even if it involves high technology
And Hyperbola will have more on European suborbital studies in the not too distant future anyway
on November 19, 2009 9:52 PM | Reply
Er, that $100M price was for the F9 Heavy.
"Elon Musk thinks his big Falcon - the Falcon 9 Heavy - will have a brochure price of just $100m, and possibly substantially less."
-Arb.
on November 19, 2009 10:57 PM | Reply
Crawling is trivial compared to walking and seems like a hopeless way to move, but it's the mandatory muscular and coordination training for infants. If after your baby takes its first steps, you don't allow it to crawl anymore, it's progress in learning to walk gets slower, never mind reaching running. Especially if you don't allow falling down!
Same with technology development. If you only demand instant bleeding edge performance for different technologies on the first try, you are only going to keep doing very small derivative changes. Or you pay absolutely mind boggling sums to develop "right the first time" stuff. And it often turns out to be not so fantastic in operations...
If on the other hand you can develop and experiment first at the lower performance cheap category (say, crawling is a lot less investment than walking because you don't constantly fall down) before moving on to demanding things, you can test a lot more approaches and options for the same price. You reduce risk and weed out stuff that doesn't work out once you try it in real operations. For example things that are maintenance nightmares.
Some technologies are pretty dead ends in my view, like the hybrid motor on Burt Rutan's designs. That was required for winning the X Prize though (again see schedule vs sustainability, Apollo being the poster child). Liquids and solids were both more dangerous and not really readily available back then, at least not quickly. And their suborbital hopper planes can still demonstrate a lot of important things even if the future of routine rocket propulsion turns out to be completely different.
So yes, Usain Bolt was crawling when Carl Lewis was running very fast times. That certainly was trivial... and a way to miss the point completely.
Suborbitals are far from orbital rockets in performance (and lunar lander challenge vehicles are even more modest, though they turn around very quickly!). A bit closer to some orbital rockets' stages. But they can be used to develop much much operationally cheaper capabilities than current orbital rockets. And then when they are grown in performance, building on that, there's a good possibility the cost won't grow to be as big as with current rockets.
The first pressurized airplanes were small and very costly as well. Yet they are bigger and routinely flown by people today for very cheap. The STS is a very costly RLV and operationally closer to experimental than routine. Future orbital RLV:s might be easier to operate and thus cheaper. Only one orbital RLV has been tried so far.