Capital Takes to Space

...Companies that exploit the off-the- shelf technologies of satellite com- munication and remote sensing pio- neered by NASA and DOD are now well established, and new ones are springing up every day...

...While the U.S...

...NASA should have been more concerned with studying the stars with a functioning telescope—put up with an ELY if necessary—than devoting one-quarter of its budget to shaving minor ineffi- ciencies from the shuttle rocket perfor- mance...

...Not only concern for safety but insurance costs dictate the site position...

...Challenger's aftermath transformed NASA...

...For the moment, however, satellite communication and remote sensing are the only producing veins...

...Larger ocean-going ships cost about $1,000 an hour to operate...

...This is a job for engineers in the private sector who will make extra dollars if they can pull it off (and who know when to stop when they can't...

...Then rocket motors would take over and carry it on out...

...Despite rosy predictions in the sixties of launch cost of a few hundred dollars a pound by the late seventies, the cost of getting into orbit is still incredibly high, with everything figured in...

...Added to the replacement cost of actual systems is liability coverage...

...Living in space might become as natural to some of our great-grandchildren as living in Oregon is to Oregonians...

...Space an international scientific playground, ganite sentiment, NASA had compel- $40 billion to date in the shuttle) and Services plans to be one of the first with no individual ownership of prop- ling economic reasons to follow the voter enthusiasm for space exploration concerns to blast private payloads in- erty and off limits to anyone not highly Soviet model...

...Wouldn't it have been cheaper, ask critics, to in- vest directly in, say, making computer chips or Tang than have the space pro- gram do it by accident...

...To get more launches, the that people laughed at him when he them horrible) in stride, never making the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous...

...The chief reason is that NASA is no longer allowed to fly com- mercial payloads into orbit and DOD can purchase ELVs once more...

...Everyone is familiar with the pictures from Landsat (now controlled by a semi-private company) and from the GOES weather satellites on the evening news...

...NASA's focus adventure—of finding out things no should be done on behalf of the human couldn't NASA do the same...

...Many capitalists with grounded satellites would have loved to use the Soviet capabilities to get their birds up, but the satellites' high tech legally prevented Western business from doing so...

...In 1976, eight equatorial nations signed the Declaration of Bogota, claiming that the geosyn- chronous orbital plane is theirs...

...after one has known before—combines in species, and not on behalf of the prof- sending men 216,420 miles into space the same person with an instinct to it motive of a few people...

...The area around earth can be likened to a deep hole, with water and life—the earth— at the bottom: a gravity well, if you will...

...As Deagle notes, it was not Challenger that left us grounded...

...Even more important is proximity to the equator...

...Space will be commercialized, because commerce is what humans naturally do...

...Guess what: NASA charged ple, too...

...Everyone else had to wait...

...aerospace cornfalling around the earth at 25,200 miles panies, and to use only the shuttle...

...taxpayer...

...It is the frontier and the human race is in the pioneering stage of its journey...

...launch vehicle (ELY), the Conestoga, And of course the Soviets would American space program has suffered NASA set out to do so...

...Each transponder can handle between 500 and a thousand telephone conversations or one television channel...

...You may hear wondrous tales of orbiting pharmaceutical plants and gallium arsenide chip factories in free-fall about the earth, and these may be whistles in the dark of a mineshaft that is about to hit paydirt...

...Several communities are in various stages of planning spaceports and woo-ing users...

...Aside from just staying out of theway, the best thing NASA could do is to find cheaper ways to get into orbit...

...A jet engine uses oxygen from the atmosphere to react with its fuel— thus it doesn't have to carry liquid oxygen as rockets must...

...In the end, several smaller spaceports will most probably be built—which may be for the best, considering where relying on single systems has got us in the past...

...That way, if the thing blows up (one did), the shards will fall into the sea and not into people's living rooms...

...astronaut Deke Slayton, Hannah runs left would agree...

...Landsat has helped the oil business a lot, and with a better imager up there, we could do even more...

...There are those who disagree, expendable launch vehicle industry was of course, and until 1986, they stood decimated...

...Not only lives but money is saved using weather satellites...

...At the moment, space is not a very hospitable place for man...

...One, Payload Systems of Washington, D.C., has an agreement with the USSR to do protein crystallization experiments on the Mir space station...

...Bevies of small-is- est rockets in town...

...Geosynchronous orbit—a position that allows a satellite to hang seemingly motionless over a patch of ground—is valuable real estate indeed, for that is precisely where communica- tions satellites must be placed...

...For instance, Third Millennium of Washington, D.C., headed by the former chief of shuttle design for Rockwell International, Len Cormier, aims to build a "space van," a shuttle-like creature that will piggyback to high altitude on a 747, then fly into orbit under its own power...

...Small packets could, in this way, be hotfooted up into orbit, since every action (streaming vapors, for instance) has an equal and opposite reaction (a small satellite flying into space, for example...

...Who knows what we will come up with next...

...NASA systematically, and with malice afore- thought, went out and dismantled the private launch business in America...

...If those costs could be brought down, new uses could be found for the weightlessness of free- fall...

...But the shuttle needed more satellites to send began Space Services in 1979...

...Fortunately, new director James Fletch- er seems to be heading NASA in the right direction...

...Which is as it should be...

...These incredibly powerful devices could be trained on the bottom of an object and vaporize controlled portions of that object—giving the thing a hotfoot, as it were...

...Along with former beautiful types and other groups on the nately, they were rockets subsidized by up—barely outside the atmosphere...

...According to John S. Lewis of the University of Arizona, the last remaining set of plans to the Saturn V was given away during a Boy Scout paper drive in Huntsville, Alabama...

...Cosmonauts—the seemingly out of NASA...

...One concern, Oceanroutes, of Palo Alto, California, takes data from weather satellites and other sources to produce routing recommendations for ships that sign on to the service...

...Technology and the press of commerce are leading us in such a direction...

...Like Europe sitting on the shores of a huge ocean extremely difficult to cross, looking with hungry eyes across the Atlantic to the New World, we are on the edge of space, seeing only indistinctly what might await us there...

...The craft would then either go into orbit or descend—after a very short time in the air—in, say, Japan (the Orient in "Orient Express...

...What were we profit from these manifests—NASA is financing for his dream, and expects Soviet version of the techie—have set doing up there anyway...

...Air transportation as well as space access would be revolu- tionized...

...Aside from facing a As the cost of the Space Shuttle's and provides the financing for Space they claim, as we treat Antarctica—as Congress moved in large part by Sa- development rose (we've invested about Services, Inc., a rocket company...

...Both companies are trying to capture the under-3,000pound payload market...

...It's too im- and back, NASA began to devote one make a buck, the mixture is potent in- portant to go back to the model of the U ntil 1986, NASA had the cheap- quarter of its budget to a system deed...

...The more is a workhorse that is at base a rede- agree with at least some of Sagan's sen- an analogous fate: after the stunning launches and the less time between signed Redstone rocket—the same class timents...

...Hannah claims the years, absorbing losses (some of and kicking, bringing us Skylab and recouped...

...Most of these companies have rockets that are not very different from old missiles...

...The niche which newer companies hope to fill is in the general, all-purpose rocket that could not deliver a warhead to within miles of a silo, but can throw things off the planet well enough...

...The space- plane is exactly the kind of project that ought to be NASA's bread and butter: advanced, risky, initially unprofitable...

...Currently a joint project of NASA and DOD, the spaceplane would take off and fly to the upper atmosphere like a jet airplane...

...Multiply that a thou- sand times...

...The West was left without one reliable system...

...NASA should be limited to explora- tion of space and advanced space hardware—which could be transporta- tion hardware to get us off the planet, as well as hardware for traveling around in space once we get there," says Arizona's William Ganoe, an expert on space commercialization...

...Martin Marietta's Titan, with estimated costs of $100 million a launch, is the true giant of the lot, lifting up to 10,000 pounds (the size of the largest of satellites...

...No one is exactly sure how far legal blame would extend if, say, a misguided private rocket crashed into Buenos Aires...

...Soviet space stations are little more than tin cans falling around the earth with two or three cosmonauts aboard...

...They are 22,300-mile-high radio towers...

...N ow things are looking up...

...After the R&D has been paid for, how does $8 a pound per spaceshot strike you...

...Obviously, the choice U.S...

...guard at the gates of the heavens, ex- "NASA is the outfit that did eluding some and intensely regulating everything they could to ruin any kind all others who wished to get into space...

...We should treat space, the U.S...

...And space technology is paying off in some unex- pected areas...

...Reports say they are smelly and cramped...

...Space Services' closest competition is AMROC (the techie new name of what was the American Rocket Company), of Palo Alto, California...

...sites are Florida and Hawaii—and both states are gearing up accordingly...

...By and large, the shuttle will be restricted to research and development activities and some military missions...

...Further: loving, warring, and creating art, corn- after a bureaucratic battle, the Departmerce is one of the things human be- ment of Defense was told to stop buyings naturally do—even when they are ing rockets from U.S...

...When we have a cheaper way up the gravity well, space will truly become our next economic frontier...

...Space Services' Conestoga is a perfect example of such a beast...

...Take an example: the Hubble Space Telescope has been dry-docked for years now, waiting to get up...

...There are so many neat things about micro-gravity—the hard vacuum, the weightlessness, continuous solar radiation in certain orbits and so on—it seems intuitively obvious there will be many things that can be donethere...

...are rolling again—and not only for the big three suppliers of private rockets, Martin Marietta, General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas...

...Such criticism overlooks the fundamental fact of sci- entific research: you don't know what you're going to find when you start out...

...There are various international laws and treaties allegedly governing the use of outer space...

...We just don't understand what and how to do everything yet...

...There are possibilities on the draw- ing board, with President Reagan's vaunted "Orient Express" being the most promising for early development (Michael Dukakis, incidentally, is op- posed to the spaceplane...

...NASA should act as a customer wherever and whenever appropriate...

...The company launches its rockets off an island on the southeast Texas coast (all have been tests so far...

...But Han- a secret of its final goal: orbiting in- fire had gone out of the public and up...

...Then, you might want to get a concession and go exploring for oil...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 15 is coming...

...There the earth is spinning its fastest, and rockets can use this spin as an extra push (or, more precisely, the extra spin means they don't have to catch up with the earth later) to save fuel—lots of it...

...One rocket company executive has called these the Indy cars of the rocket business, designed for performance, not cost-effectiveness...

...Some entrepreneurs have other ideas, though...

...Rocket assembly lines in the U.S...

...Consciously...

...of private, domestic rocket business," science fiction writer and early SDI adJ Anthony Daniel, TAS's 1988 summer vocate Jerry Pournelle told me...

...Planetary exploration is just the same...

...Nevertheless, this alleged overabundance of resources will no doubt evaporate as more and more uses are found for them...

...You can evaluate these areas without having to go in and do anything...

...These sites include Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg Air Force Base, and Virginia's Wallops Flight Facility...

...Dallas's Hunt Oil Co...

...In space, it is the weight-to-income ratio that determines profit...

...So far, no one takes them very seriously, but this portends the sort of trouble human doings in space may one day cause...

...uses Landsat images to search for oil...

...For instance, an enterpris- ing amateur archaeologist who works for a concern that interprets Landsat data for other users recently found a series of Mayan ruins in the jungles of Mexico by using computer-enhanced Landsat images...

...Several other nations are also vying for a spaceport, with Australia in the lead...

...For the moment, high-orbit space and beyond is a libertarian's paradise: if you can get there, you can do whatever you want, more or less...

...Because the shuttle only goes about 300 miles above the earth, satellites launched from the shuttle must climb the rest of the way under their own power...

...NASA has been accused of inflating its "spin-off" claims to get extra funding...

...With one quick cough you will expel your lungs' contents...

...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988...

...With the competition for launches and a resulting reduction in cost, a remote sensing satellite (or even satellite system) better than Landsat—even than the French SPOT—could be orbited...

...make money out of space, NASA 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 would go around to their potential customers and say, 'Look, you don't have to finance the development of any [launch] competition to us...

...Imagine a series of elevators going up and down a bundle of such cables (skyhooks, they are called) powered, perhaps, by free- electron lasers...

...But unlike Skylab, they stay in the sky...

...Perhaps then we would see those drug and chip factories—and much, much more...

...The craft would be piloted by a human being—but more like a Federal Express pilot than an astronaut...

...The costs of getting into space would drop more precipitously than the costs of computers have over the last twenty years...

...The Soviet space program has Apollo missions of the sixties and ear- launches, the quicker the fixed cost of of rocket that first carried a U.S...

...At present, many phone calls, cable television, and—increasingly important—business data transmission fill most of the frequencies...

...insuring a launch can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars...

...substantially lower than the cheapest Where man or his machines go, soon- commercial rocket, thereby undercuter or later business follows...

...it is not home...

...don't usually hear of Soviet space set- were scrubbed...

...Unfortu- designed to put people about 300 miles real estate magnate...

...Within the next twenty years or so, even stranger schemes are possible...

...Take communications satellites: modern birds, as they are called, are essentially packets of transponders—a device that catches a signal beamed up, amplifies it, and retransmits it to a receiving station...

...Figure an average of four hours saved per trip...

...When love of Space, "is that the exploration of space tral governmental planning...

...Your sweat and tears will freeze, and your oxygen-starved brain will drift away seeing an unpleasant haze...

...Meanwhile the Soviets were going full strength, even testing their own Saturn V clone, the Proton...

...Funding was a government agency, after all—a shut-eventually to make $100 to $120 million numerous endurance records...

...Skylab, originally con- NASA wanted it to cost...

...Space Services is planning to tie a bundle of seven ELVs together and ignite them simultaneously—this would provide the thrust necessary to take a satellite to geosynchronous orbit (22,300 miles out...

...A nd what do we want to send up with all these rockets...

...We've had the know-how since before the launch of Sputnik...

...NASA, completely committed to the shuttle, took its own time-tested ELV, the Saturn V rocket, and "laid it on its side as a lawn ornament," as Pournelle puts it...

...A cable draped down from geosynchronous orbit to the earth would be stationary in rela- tion to us surface dwellers...

...Ultimately, capitalism and traditions of individual worth will drive the West onward and upward, while the Soviets' essentially self-limiting goals (and self-limiting economy) will keep them in low-earth orbit for the most part...

...Brash start-ups are trying to give the big three a run for their money—so far with limited success...

...The Soviets are able to conduct long-term micro-gravity experiments and study the effects of weightlessness on the human body over several months, which is essential research for a Mars mission and, eventually, the industrialization of space...

...We've got to do our homework," says Ganoe, "before we can really go out there and build a large industrial base in space...

...Then came the Challenger explosion...

...After climbing to 210 miles, he would drop the payload and thenbring the van in for a conventional landing...

...lost an astronaut to space exposure, the try and make the shuttle pay for itself...

...SDI researchers in high energy physics are in the early stages of developing free-electron lasers...

...The rocket assembly lines of the big three aerospace companies—Martin Marietta, General Dynamics, and McDonnell Douglas—would have been scrapped, with a three-to-five year re-starting wait, according to Edwin A. Deagle, Jr., of Hughes Aircraft...

...Take David Hannah, a Houston robber baron...

...General Dynamics' Atlas-Centaur and Mac's Delta-2 will take 5,000 and 3,200 pounds, respectively...

...Close behind them is a third tier of ELV services, among them CONETEC, E'Prime, Pacific American Launch, and LTV...

...Since it did not have to make a nah has either provided or found the dustrial collectives...

...Many went nowhere...

...Since remote sensing satellites went up in the late fifties, oil and mineral riches have been discovered from space and intelligence gathering made vastly easier...

...He probably saved millions of dollars and many years of searching by pre-Columbian archae- ologists...

...ELVs can carry satellites all the way up, but no matter how you do it, it costs plenty...

...That way they do not need the extensive checks which disassembly and reassembly after transport require...

...Every intern, studies film at the University of time anyone came up with a way to Southern California...

...has never died down, Congress asked NASA to to orbit for a profit...

...Death in space is smooth and quick...

...This is the sort of research made to order for the shuttle bay and, eventually, for a space station and lunar base...

...About 1,000 ships a month, 80 percent of the market, use Oceanroutes...

...Remember what the laying of the railroad did for the American West...

...Where did companies and countries who wanted to launch satellites go...

...changed from ventures to systems...

...You can acquire the satellite image of anywhere in the world...

...Average cost is about $700 per ship per trip...

...We have about $7.5 billion invested in communications satellites, with a return of about $3 billion a year...

...Fluids evaporate and the body becomes desiccated, freeze-dried...

...Your body does not explode...

...Since we reduced...

...This is partially due to the Challenger explo- sion, but getting it there is something the engineers could have done long ago...

...Rocket companies want to assemble their ELVs right next to where they will fire them off...

...There are treaties making most governments wholly responsible for their national launches, so insurance companies aren't taking any chances...

...Not a bad deal...

...Along with ting its private competitors...

...To get from the surface 22,300 miles out to geosynchronous orbit re- quires vast amounts of energy per unit of mass...

...With the failure of the Army's Titan IV the U.S...

...This choice, they believe, is less risky and costly than developing new systems...

...And whatever capacity is not used for liquid oxygen can be used for payload...

...Perhaps...

...The big three have a lead in that they had off-the-shelf rockets (otherwise known as missiles) already in production...

...NASA should be the province of scien- tists doing science, rather than—as is still too often the case—scientists try- ing to do engineering...

...Insurance has become the major expense in space operations...

...In all, there are about 1,000 transponders orbiting the earth, enough to produce a temporary transponder glut...

...The an hour...

...W by is private initiative sudden- ly out of the corral and charg- ing into space...

...There is also fierce competition from fiber optic technology (see Malcolm Gladwell's "The Fiber Optic Revolution" in the August 1987 TAS...

...Research, inherently unprofitable at first, should be NASA's raison d'etre...

...was out of roads into orbit...

...Yet some companies tried to get around the restrictions...

...You don't have to get anybody's permission to get it," said Calvin F Miller, a senior geologist at Hunt...

...There are plans for a nationwide paging system and, with the expected fall in the price of satellite dishes, a reinvigorated satellite TV market...

...Then it failed...

...Why only three crews...

...Big money indeed...

...Without looking closely, one might think you were sleeping...

...space policy had quietly destroyed all rocket production in America...

...Their expendable trained in keeping the place untouched...

...NASA needs to be preparing for this by re- searching ways for folks to stay alive and make money there once we have our easy ride up...

...Nobody dies anymore because he doesn't know a hurricane Commerce is one of the things human beings naturally do—even when they are falling around the earth at 25,200 miles an hour...

...For the first time, families—nations—rather than a few machines and their techie pilots, would be exported into space...

...There are two requirements: industrial support and nearness to the equator...

...Especially in Hawaii's case, the launch site would be surrounded by water so that discarded stages or errant rockets could fall only into the sea...

...After all, if it hadn't been for war research, would we have cheap air transportation (and clogged airports raking in money) today...

...Europe's Ariannea quasi-private ELV blasting off out of French Guiana—was completely booked...

...AMROC has test-fired its rocket engine, which uses solid fuel sprayed with a liquid oxidizer (compared with Space Services' liquid oxygen-kerosene Conestoga engine) but has not actually flown anything...

...Moreover, since most satellites are going to be orbiting directly above the equator, they can save on fuel spent getting into position once they are up in the sky...

...O nly two forces, for the most "My personal view," said Carl Sagan backs, many in the West see the Soviet ceived of as the first in an infrastrucpart, can drive people into before the National Commission on space effort as a true success of cen- ture of space stations, was manned by space: love and money...

...Most ELV services plan to launch out of government-owned sites—a situation analogous to airlines flying out of municipal airports, they claim...

...Actual costs, And if the market calls for it, Hannah all things considered, are nearly $10,000 sees no problem with sending up peo- a pound...

...Here is where NASA could make itself useful...

...gone its steady, unspectacular way over ly seventies, NASA looked to be alive developing the shuttle could be astronaut into space...

...Horrible as it was, the consequences might have been worse if a shuttle had blown up, say, two years later...

...We'll fly your mission and we'll do it at a rate lower than those guys will give you.' NASA systematically, and with malice aforethought, went out and dismantled the private launch business in America...

...the last three lunar landings tle flight could cost a client whatever a year with a twelve-launch schedule...