Commercial Spaceflight Isn't About Sending Fatcats to Space

I've seen a fair bit of "hate the rich" sentiment toward various "space tourism" ventures out there, such as Virgin Galactic's White Knight 2, XCOR's Lynx, and other development efforts toward reusable suborbital spaceflight. I feel this is driven by the usual specious reports by the media about space tourism and seat costs in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars to drive the class warfare point home. Naturally, the first image that will come to someone's mind when seeing these reports is some overstuffed fat cat buying themselves a $200,000 joy ride at the expense of others.

The fact is, a point has been missed here. Space tourism is the economic model that's being used to draw investment for this work, but it's not the reality of where this work is going. In order to get money to do something new, without a proven business model, you have to build a business model from scratch. This means finding something that will presumably pay the bills and earn enough to pay investors a return at least as good as an investment in another proven economic activity, such as investing in a restaurant or manufacturing. In fact, the return needs to be better, at least on paper, to induce investors to take the risk of not putting their money into something proven.

For reusable suborbital launches, the case was made using space tourism. That's because none of the other potential uses is really well known, but a unique luxury offering could be pretty well characterized, and counted on to deliver a return.

But the real value in these quick trips to space lies elsewhere than in joy rides for someone with $200,000 burning a hole in their pocket.

It's Like a Reusable Mercury-Redstone for Suborbital Research

The Next Generation Suborbital Researchers' Conference is one group that's excited about the prospect of cheap suborbital flights. Currently, the overall cost of a sub-orbital flight on a sounding rocket is about $3.5M. The costs to the users are less, because much of that costs is subsidized by NASA, and by sharing of launches between institutions. It costs each institution about $50,000 to $500,000 per launch with somewhere from half a dozen to a dozen institutions sharing the costs between themselves. This gives them the chance to launch about a half a cubic foot to a cubic foot of payload on a short flight on a rocket. It will experience at least 25Gs of acceleration, with shocks of double that or more. Nobody can ride along, so the success of the flight will depend on the researchers' ability to automate their payload (adding considerably to the costs of building and testing the payload before flight.)

Flight on one of the new commercial launchers will cost the institutions about $50,000 to $400,000 per launch. They get to send a person to operate the experiment, and likewise to experience the ride, if they choose. They may also buy a package where they send their equipment, which will then be operated by a space tourist paying their own way who has been trained to operate the experiment, or the package may be activated by the spacecraft's crew.

The commercial space operators are already putting together special deals for the space researchers. They can buy into multiple flights at discounted rates.

Plus, their payloads can experience flight at human comfort levels, 3Gs or less, with controlled temperature, air, etc. This results in far less cost. The same instrument package used on the desktop at the university's lab can be the same one sent on the flight. It doesn't have to go through vacuum testing, extensive testing of the automation under different conditions, hardened against high shock loads, etc. Standard safety design and testing for not bursting into flames and filling the cabin with smoke will still be necessary, but that's a big step down in cost and effort from what's required for a sounding rocket flight. That drops research costs even more.

Another important point is that these flights will be far more available than sounding rocket flights. NASA launches somewhere around a dozen sounding rocket flights each year. The commercial flights will be more frequent, and easier for an institution to get a payload on board, deal with schedule changes, and so on.

Teachers in Space
Another purpose of the new commercial "tourism" flights is to send the sort of tourists I think most of us would want to send. Teachers in Space is a program that can't wait to use commercial spaceflight to send teachers into space with student research at all levels of education. Speaking as a part-time teacher myself, I can say that it helps the students a lot to hear about science and spaceflight from someone who's actually been involved in it. If we have a growing cadre of science teachers who can start a statement to students with, "When I flew in space...", work alongside them on projects they're building that will actually go into space, it will bring a sense of reality and engagement to their education that's so hard to get otherwise.

Other Desirable Space Tourists

There are plenty of other people we, as a society, would like to see get a chance to experience space travel. Make A Wish Foundation flights? Rewards for science fairs? Small companies doing their own research to compete against larger ones? There are many, many uses for these vehicles that have nothing to do with the ultra-rich burning off spare dollars.

Opening Up Space

That just happens to be the easiest way to show that there's a potential profit at the end of the long development process for those who invest in the companies making this happen. So don't be fooled by reports making the commercial space industry out to be nothing more than a new form of luxury for plutocrats. This is about giving little people the access to space that's so far been limited to governments and richer institutions. This is the same sort of revolution that we got with the microprocessor, which brought computers into our homes then into our pockets. Once upon a time, the computer was known to the average person as a tool of oppression. When your bank or government told you that their computer said you owed them so much money, you were stuck fighting a battle against the authority of a tool you didn't have. When we got our own computers, we got the power to tell them back, "Well, my computer says..."

Now, we're on the verge of having space access be democratized in the same fashion. Virgin Galactic, XCOR, and Blue Origin are not the end of this particular road, any more than the first heavy, balky, difficult to build and use microcomputers from before 1977 were the end of the process of democratizing the computer. But if early public sentiment had risen to kill off the early small computers as nothing more than toys for the rich, where would your tablet and cell phone come from today?

Be glad the rich are there, willing to buy tickets for a space adventure. Because they're there, the way is being opened for your kids and their teachers, their work and research.

In the words of Alan Stern, "The access revolution is about to happen. When these guys are flying all the time, and you can fly an experiment over and over and over and get different data sets all the time, close the loop and fly an experiment the next week and the week after, I think we're going to see the best applications be things we haven't thought of yet, because we're kind of looking at it through old eyes." (Aviation Week, June 17, 2013, "Suborbital, But Reusable" reporting on the 2013 NGSRC.)

Ace of Aces Game Reprint on Kickstarter

My Ace of Aces Book Sets from Back in the Day...
Today Could Be "The Day" All Over Again!

Ace of Aces Rotary Edition Kickstarter

One of my favorite games of all time has been out of print for over 25 years. Ace of Aces is a game that uses pairs of books to show different locations of two dogfighting WWI aircraft. You look at where your opponent is, try to anticipate their maneuver, then pick your own maneuver. Once once you decide what you're going to do, you call off the page number under your maneuver to your opponent. They call off a number to you. You then go to the page number they called, and look up your own maneuver. They do the same. You both get a final page number, and turn to that page (they'll both be the same, so you can cross-check to avoid errors.)

There you have your new position relative to each other.



On the pages above, you can see two different positions. The page on the left has your opponent out past your left wingtip, approaching at an angle. Aha! Time to simple pitch into a stall maneuver and let him come right in line with your guns! (Unless you think they're going to stall and wing-over to put you in line with theirs.)

On the right hand page, we're being fired on! Dangit! Score one for the other guy.

Fortunately, all those little squares you see below the big pictures are your choices of manuever. There are a lot of them, so if you find yourself in the position of the page on the right you have a lot of crafty things you can do to get out of the line of fire and save the day.

This game is quick and easy to learn, and can be expanded as much as you care to expand it. It has optional rules for different models of aircraft, hit locations, etc. Plus, I and some friends turned it into a campaign-level RPG in high school. We added rules for pilot recruitment and skill levels, organizing squadrons, procuring and repairing aircraft, and so on.

But I have to say I've played it as a casual pick-up five minute game with a lot more people. It takes less than 5 minutes to learn the basic game, and you can play the games up to number of hits, first blood, or whatever you wish to make it quick and light.

Ace of Aces Kickstarter
Now there's a Kickstarter Project to reprint the first set of books from the game. It's very nearly funded as I write this (about $500 away), and you want to get in on it!

This project is for the "Handy Rotary" books, which recreate the aircraft with rotary engines and high torque and maneuverability. These were the first original books, and they're a lot of fun. I have this set and the Powerhouse set. If this Kickstarter goes well, we'll be seeing the other book sets coming in future Kickstarters.

There are also some really neat Ace of Aces T-Shirts as swag. Read the updates, you'll see.

Enjoy.

An Update to the First Heavier Than Air Flying Machine

In July 1869, when Wilbur Wright was two years old, and Orville was as yet unborn, a heavier than air flying machine successfully flew two half-mile circles in a tethered flight test. The craft was known as the Avitor.

Lost in Time

The Avitor has been largely forgotten. It was what we'd call a hybrid vehicle today, very unlike the craft later flown by the Wright Brothers. The Avitor flew well and successfully, but an accident with a prototype resulted in its development being halted prematurely. If development had continued, it's very likely that modern aircraft would be very different from what they are today.

Many of the design concepts of the Avitor are being rediscovered and applied to new aircraft development. Among these are aerodynamic lift from the aircraft body (Blended Wing-Body aircraft, today) and hybrid lift (lift from a combination of buoyancy, power, and aerodynamics.)

The Past is the Future

The closest thing to a modern day Avitor is currently in development by Northrop Grumman. It's a vehicle they call the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, or LERV. The name describes its use, something that can hang in the sky for long periods of time keeping an eye on things. The present program's goal is to develop a surveillance platform for use in Afghanistan. It is supposed to go there for operation testing within a year. First flight is to come this summer.

After a Brief 150 year Hiatus, the Return of Avitor?

There are other potential applications for this craft that Northrop intends to work toward. Perhaps by the Sesquicentennial of the Avitor's demonstration flight, we'll have our own 21st century Avitors roaming the skies.

Related Links:

• Flying Machines--Frederick Marriot


• Hiller Aviation Museum--The Avitor


• Mark Twain: Frederick Marriot and the Avitor


• Northrop Grumman: Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle