Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Response to the Plight of Human Space Exploration
Today I have been given the opportunity to pass on some commentary on the Columbia report by Dr. Charles Lurio, consultant in the field of space enterprise, policy and engineering. Dr. Lurio included two stories from the NYT which describe some of the current private enterprise undertakings in the field.
Dr. Lurio: Below are the lead articles of today's New York Times Science Times section - on the prospect for going beyond the inevitable constraints of the NASA system in achieving practical space access. I'm quoted in there and very much appreciate the reporter's interest. But a quick anecdote: I listened a bit to the press conference on the Columbia report today. There was a comment to the effect of how many good engineers there are at NASA - and I wish to emphasize that I couldn't agree more with that. But there were superb engineers in IBM circa 1970. That didn't mean that the 'behavioral genetics' of that organization was any better suited to bringing about the personal computer revolution than NASA is suited to bring about practical space access. No doubt the Board's findings hold the potential for NASA to get _its_ human space transportation programs into better shape - but only within narrow limits of the system by which you bring about such access. It would be folly to expect the NASA system to be able to generate practical, low cost and safe access to orbit. That road requires significant new markets, and the creativity of many different groups. Yours very truly, Charles A. Lurio, Ph.D. Consulting in Space Enterprise, Policy and Engineering . From the NYT: ____________________________________________________________ August 26, 2003 Eyes on a Prize, Entrepreneurs Seek to Launch a New Industry By JOHN SCHWARTZ MESQUITE, Tex. -- Russell Blink is squeezing into a spacesuit. It is the real thing, made for Russian astronauts. John Carmack, his fellow dreamer, bought it for $5,000. Like the technologies for making rocket engines that showed up in industrial catalogs, it was, simply, out there. "Isn't it amazing what you can get on eBay these days?" Mr. Carmack says with a wicked smile. If the past of spaceflight lies with NASA, which is bracing for the Aug. 26 report into the Columbia shuttle disaster, the future of spaceflight may be starting here, in a cluster of office parks east of Dallas near body shops, heavy-equipment rental yards and flooring stores. In a high-ceilinged warehouse, a small group of dedicated hobbyists led by Mr. Carmack, a software millionaire, is trying to build a rocket from largely off-the-shelf components that the members fully expect will take Mr. Blink into space on the cheap. Then again, the future may lie in a very different place: a high-tech shop in the Mojave Desert, Scaled Composites, where Burt Rutan, an innovative aviation designer, is putting together his own craft. Or it could be in any of the other two dozen teams from five countries that are hoping to win the X Prize, a contest whose founders hope will jump-start a private space race and create a space tourism industry. The competition has garnered the interest of space freaks, tech zillionaires like the founder of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, and more. (Mr. Bezos declined to talk about his space research company, Blue Origin L.L.C., or to say whether he planned to participate in the X Prize competition.) None of the teams seem to be doing things the way that NASA does them, but that's the point -- to get to space in an entirely new way. For now, only the governments of the United States and Russia launch humans into space; China plans to try later this year. The two space tourists so far have paid millions of dollars to fly on Russian craft. A private space industry would face many roadblocks. "The environmental impact study is a big, big hassle," Mr. Carmack says, and the Federal Aviation Administration is still trying to determine what kind of process should be used to regulate the flights. But advocates of space exploration say there has to be an alternative to what they see as the expensive, bureaucratic over-engineering of NASA. The American space agency would create "the plutonium-powered toaster," says Dr. Charles Lurio, a space consultant and advocate. "There's no question that there are difficulties to be overcome and dangers, but that's why you want to have a bunch of different people try a lot of different things," he said. The contest is modeled on the Orteig Prize, the competition that led to Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight in 1927 with his Spirit of St. Louis. What with inflation and the high cost of shooting things into space, the scale of the new prize is somewhat larger: $10 million to the winner, instead of the Orteig's $25,000. The connection to the Orteig Prize is important to the creator of the X Prize, Dr. Peter H. Diamandis. "Since the age of 9, I wanted to be an astronaut," he said. "It's all I dream about." He worked toward his goal, getting degrees in medicine and engineering, as well as certification in fields like aviation and scuba diving. Along the way he realized that only a tiny number of astronaut applicants get the job, and only about half of those chosen get to fly. And even those who fly rarely get many missions. So Dr. Diamandis decided to create a new industry in the private sector to send people -- or, as he calls them, "self-launching carbon payloads that come with their own money" -- into space. "I was convinced that the marketplace was real, that the technology was readily available," he said. "The only thing missing was the vehicles to jump-start the market." In 1994, a friend and fellow space advocate, Gregg E. Maryniak, gave him a copy of Lindbergh's memoir, "The Spirit of St. Louis." Dr. Diamandis realized that competitions had been an important spur to commercial aviation. The two friends enlisted several other enthusiasts and established the X Prize Foundation in St. Louis, with plans to build a monitoring center in the St. Louis Science Center. The Lindbergh connection does not stop there. Erik R. Lindbergh, Charles and Anne Lindbergh's grandson, is a trustee and vice president of the foundation. "I kind of got in under the grandfather clause," he said. Mr. Lindbergh said at first he asked, "Isn't there a better way to spend $10 million on earth?" But Dr. Diamandis reeled him in. Mr. Lindbergh talked with Dr. Byron Lichtenberg, a former astronaut and a co-founder of the prize, about the "overview effect" astronauts describe in seeing the world all at once, that "it changes them." It could be a powerful experience for a larger group of people. "I said: `Oh -- there's something more here. It's not just about money and excitement and sex appeal,' " Mr. Lindbergh said. "There's something much, much bigger here. And that is what got me involved." Still, fund-raising was slow and the prize money was only secured late last year. Old NASA hands say it's not quite as easy as it looks to the newcomers. "We're coming up on 50 years of human spaceflight and we're still learning every day," said Jay Honeycutt, the president of Lockheed Martin Space Operations and a former director of the Kennedy Space Center. "I just hope they all do understand how hard it is." Still, he said he loved the idea of the prize. "I think it's dynamite," he said. Each team is approaching the prize in its own way. Mr. Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, is the most closely watched. It is Mr. Rutan who designed Voyager, the first airplane to fly around the world without refueling. His X Prize entry has two stages: a sleek, twin-turbojet carrier aircraft, the White Knight, and a second-stage rocket, SpaceShipOne. Some competitors speculate that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is backing the project, though neither Mr. Allen's people nor Mr. Rutan's crew is talking. In any case, from his site in the Mojave Desert, Mr. Rutan has already flown the plane that will launch the space vehicle, and this month he did a drop test of the space-going component to show that it could be piloted and landed safely. Another well-regarded team, Canadian Arrow, fulfills a lifelong dream of its founder, Geoff Sheerin. An industrial designer, Mr. Sheerin is creating a rocket that would make Buck Rogers comfortable. He will launch it on an offshore barge in the Great Lakes system for a straight-up, straight-down flight, and he plans to recover the capsule from the lake. Mr. Sheerin said the prize was part of his own business plan to foster space tourism. "We intend to collect the X Prize on the way to becoming the industry," he said. Since he was a teenager in Niagara Falls, Ontario, he realized it was possible to create rockets that could launch people into space for a reasonable fee. But he found no one willing to finance such a venture. The X Prize, he said, brought out backers more comfortable with sponsoring a competitor than a business -- adventure capital, as opposed to venture capital, began to flow. "Without the prize there would be no Canadian Arrow," he said. Backers still take some convincing, however. "There's an initial skepticism," Mr. Sheerin said, "until we show up and they find we're not wearing tinfoil on our heads." Other groups have decided to make a run at space without participating in the X Prize. Jeff Greason, the president of Xcor, a California company close by Mr. Rutan's, said the conditions of the X Prize contest weren't compatible with building the vehicle that would lead to commercial spaceflight. "We are very focused on getting the cost required to enter the market down as small as possible," he said. "That leads us to a smaller vehicle that will not carry three people." He added, "We're not in a rush to be the first to do it; we want to be the first to make real money doing it." That focus on cost is what could start the next space industry, said Mr. Maryniak, now executive director of the X Prize. Historically, he said: "Space engineers sort of worship at the altar of high performance. In the real world what people have to optimize to is low cost." Setting the bar intentionally low should also make a difference, he said. X Prize calls for launching people just over 60 miles high into suborbital space, the middle frontier surpassed early in the American space program. Any passengers would still feel weightless, and the physics of launching to that level is far simpler than those needed to achieve orbital flight, Mr. Maryniak said. "It's possible for modern-day Orvilles and Wilburs to do this task," he said. Selecting the teams has been a challenge, Dr. Diamandis said. "I can't tell you the number of e-mails I've gotten that say, `Forward me a million dollars and I would be pleased to build my antigravity ship and win your X Prize.' " At the same time, he said, "You don't want to turn away those pesky bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio." What thrills him, Dr. Diamandis said, is that so many people are excited by the competition. "We're allowing people to dream again," he said. He does not deny that the endeavor has risks. "These are pioneers," he said. "Much of the stagnation in our space program is because of our inability to take risks -- we're not allowed to fail any more. There can't be new frontiers opened without embracing some level of risk." _______________________________________________ August 26, 2003 Inside the Clubhouse, a Rocket Is Being Built By JOHN SCHWARTZ MESQUITE, Tex. -- Every day is Christmas at Armadillo Aerospace as the new toys and tools arrive in the mail. "I probably spent tens of thousands of dollars on next-day shipping," says John Carmack, the founder of Armadillo Aerospace, outside Dallas. It is a tiny fraction of the wealth he accumulated as the co-founder of Id Software, the pioneering company that brought compelling, graphically rich computer games like Doom and Quake into the world. And now he's trying to come up with something out of this world. It stands nearby: a homely rocket that, in its current incarnation, looks more like rough sculpture than spacecraft, a surprising blend of high tech and handmade. The fuel tank, coated with glimmering fiberglass, is actually a tank designed for industrial water purification. The passenger capsule is made of rolled and welded aluminum, with handholds welded on here and there and scribbled notes on the metal pointing to iffy welds. Unlike some of the other teams in the X Prize competition, there is no Buck Rogers industrial design at work here. It looks for all the world like a big science fair project. "Isn't it cool?" asks Katherine Anna Kang, who is married to Mr. Carmack and is one of the seven members of the team. Climbing into Mr. Carmack's space capsule is an intensely claustrophobic experience. The pilot squeezes into a tiny space above a bulkhead made of fiberglass-aluminum honeycomb and then straps himself against a slab of foam rubber -- the kind sold in cheap mattress stores. The position is a fetal crouch, with the pilot's back facing the nose cone. The two passengers would lie in the slightly larger space below, their backs curved against the inner wall of the capsule like human parentheses. One big difference between the early days of the space program and today, Mr. Carmack says, is the number of rocketry engineering problems that have been solved. "We need to debunk the rocket science mythology," he said. For example, liquid fuel engines turn out to be built from well-understood technologies, he said. "It's just plumbing with the volume turned up a little bit," he said. Mr. Carmack speaks in a rush, with a slightly nasal tone and the punctuating grunt -- a kind of hmmph? -- that seems to give his mind a moment to catch up with the flow of words, or to close off an unfinished thought. Unlike many participants in the X Prize competition, he did not grow up dreaming of space travel. "I had a standard geek childhood," he said, but "I wasn't a true believer" in the space effort. Bit by bit, he got drawn in. He found himself reading science fiction, and inspired by the enthusiastic attention paid to the X Prize by Slashdot, an online news service. His team of volunteers has already created and tested rockets and control systems. And the volunteers know that the work is risky. They have, for example, chosen a fuel, based largely on hydrogen peroxide, that is commercially available and less toxic and volatile than, say, the hydrazine used in the space shuttle. But it still has problems. Splash a drop or two on a pair of leather shoes, and they will burst into flames. Phil Eaton, a member of the Armadillo crew, had that happen not long ago. "All of a sudden, this shoe just goes `Whoosh!' " he said. With such hazards involved, some potential suppliers have refused to do business with Armadillo. The companies' lawyers painted worst-case scenarios in which "it's going to land on a school bus full of nuns and orphans," Mr. Carmack said. A maker of propellant told him that the $1 million fuel contract wasn't worth the $25 million the company estimated it might spend defending itself in a product liability suit. "It's disappointing, but, hmmph," he said. When asked whether she minded seeing her husband spend so much on the space race, she said: "What they are trying to do is an admirable thing. It's a really great, geeky clubhouse."
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