[Moonbase-discuss] Gov. versus Private Space debate

[Samuel Coniglio]

Thank you Peter!

Your sentiments mirror mine exactly.  I worked for McDonnell Douglas 
at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for five years (1991-95).  As 
a NASA contractor, I saw first hand the tax dollars wasted on 
building multiple payload processing systems that overlapped each 
other.  The huge new Space Station Processing Facility basically does 
the exact same thing as the old Operations and Checkout Building: it 
processes payloads.  NASA never threw anything out.  I worked with 
equipment that dated back to the Apollo days. The new computer 
systems had to look and work exactly like the old analog systems: a 
physical switch had to look the same in the Graphical User Interface 
and function the same.  Here is how we tested payloads: In a room 
there is a computer, and two rows of desks. The first row closest to 
the computer sat the contractor, who flipped the switches.  The 
second row sat the NASA engineer, who read the manual and recited the 
next step in the procedure.

I left KSC in 1995 for two reasons: 1) I was tired of being stressed 
out over whether I was going to have a job (Congress tried to kill 
the Space Station several times during the early 90's), and 2) I saw 
no future there.  NASA, despite all the cool technology being created 
in the labs, was not getting any closer to getting me into space. 
The mindset was all wrong.

Remember, NASA is just another government bureaucracy.  But it is a 
unique bureaucracy.  What other government agency has a fan club? 
What other government agency has inspired so many people? What other 
government agency has raised our hopes for a positive future? What 
other government agency has pushed the human race to the next phase 
of society? The Industrial Age was replaced by the Space Age.  Now 
the Information Age has surpassed the Space Age.

You've probably heard this analogy before, but here it is for you 
newcomers.  Back in the 1920's the Federal Government initiated its 
own Federal Air Mail service.  It failed miserably. The planes were 
inferior, and several inexperienced pilots lost their lives.  The 
Federal Government  scrapped the program and began to contract out 
the Air Mail service to independent pilots.  With a guaranteed source 
of income, the airline industry was born.

This is what the private rocket companies want. They want a solid 
customer who will give them a reliable source of revenue to help them 
get regular space flight service running. But until the Federal 
Government decides this is important, nothing is going to change. 
NASA is the Microsoft of space. Without its support, no space startup 
can survive.  If one tries to go it on its own, like Beale Aerospace, 
Kistler, Kelly, Rotary, Pioneer, and a few others, they fail. Why? 
Because no investor is going to invest in a company that competes 
with the government.  Period.  Andrew Beale put $40 million of his 
own cash into his rocket company.  NASA announced the Space Launch 
Initiative program, which claims to do what Beale was doing: provide 
cheap access to space.  Beale shut down the company, citing it could 
not compete with NASA.

You may have noticed my frustration.  :-)

By the way, The Space Frontier Foundation is having its annual 
conference in Los Angeles next week, Oct 18-22:
http://www.space-frontier.org/
This group is politically savvy, and supports multiple projects like 
near earth asteroid detection, and cheap access to space.  If you 
want to become a space activist, or are simply curious, check it out.
Peter, your work on advanced propulsion systems would be interesting 
to our group.

Enough rambling. I hope we did not scare everyone off this list. :-)

Sam Coniglio


At 4:07 PM -0700 10/9/01, Peter Cheeseman wrote:
>Hi All,
>
>     Sorry I have not contributed to the discussion so far--I have been
>on travel, and only
>just caught up with the government/private space discussion.  The
>following is a quick
>summary of the points I would like to make....
>
>1) NASA is a large organization organization which does many
>things..flies the shuttle,
>runs the space station (ISS), explores the solar system (Voyager,
>Pathfinder, Galileo, etc.),
>observes the earth (Landsat, Eos-AM, etc.), operates space observatories
>(Hubble,
>Chandra, IRAS, etc.), to name a few.  My criticism was directed at
>NASA's post Apollo efforts in space
>launch capability, not all its activities (although I have strong
>reservations about the
>cost effectiveness of is Shuttle and ISS investments).  Essentially,
>post Apollo, NASA has
>not built or designed rockets, with the exception of the shuttle main
>engine--a technical "success",
>but an economic disaster.  All the expendable rockets, and the shuttle
>servicing is done by
>contractors, with oversight by NASA.  This oversight generally drives up
>costs, without
>contributing significantly to performance.  It is my view that NASA
>should get out of the space
>launch business itself, and should become instead a customer of
>privately owned and operated space
>launch providers.  This still leaves all of space science missions
>(manned and unmanned) as
>NASA's primary mission.  My primary reason for getting NASA out of the
>rocket business,
>is that getting into orbit is no longer a **technical** problem, but a
>problem of **economics**.
>The government list of failures in developing new rockets (e.g. X-33,
>X-34, Delta-3, etc.) is
>impressive--any commercial operation with this record would have gone
>bankrupt long ago.
>Government organizations have a poor historical record of doing things
>cheaply, mainly because they
>are not motivated by minimizing cost (or maximizing profit).  It is
>possible to design, build and
>launch very cheap expendable rockets, but not by using the extemely
>complex (and costly) legacy
>rockets from the 1950's (Delta, Atlas, Titan).  Throwing more money at
>the same contractors who
>operate these expensive dinosaurs, as NASA (SLI) and the Air Force
>(EELV) are doing, is a very
>poor investment, and is almost guaranteed to produce the same costly
>failures as earlier such efforts.
>
>2) I agree that **in principle** there should be no conflict between
>private and government efforts
>to develop space access.  In practice, however, the governments prior
>investments not only have been
>failures, but that act to scare potential investors away, as they do not
>see the point in completing with
>such deep pockets.  Most private rocket ventures to date have failed
>primarily because of failed funding
>(although some poor design choises helped).  By offering guaranteed
>prices for current launch needs,
>and getting out of the launch business, the government could make the
>launch business a more attractive
>proposition.
>
>3) My preference for private over government launch capability is not
>due to any political bias (if anything
>I am mostly on the left side of the spectrum), but caused by direct
>observation of NASA in operation.  It
>has become so risk adverse, political and safety concious that almost
>nothing innovative goes forward.
>
>4) On a personal note, I want to add that my interest in cheap space
>access is mainly motivated by the
>realization that the long term survival of the human race depends on
>getting off earth--sooner or later
>weapons will become so powerful that their destructive range will reach
>the scale of the planet.
>
>---hope this contributes to the discussion....
>
>Peter Cheeseman
>=============
>
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