When I first heard mention of this last week, I scoffed because it struck me as just another bandwagon-jumping scheme akin to “green energy”. But as the video points out, there are good reasons to consider a spaceport in Colorado beyond the “us too” factor. The most important being the fact that there are a lot of commercial aerospace companies in Colorado, including Dreamchaser-builder Sierra Nevada, who might profit from providing and/or using services at the spaceport, and the airport’s proximity to a major hub airport, which can feed passengers and high-value cargo into potential future point-to-point suborbital transportation services.

I’m against “public-private partnerships” and subsidies and the like on principle, but it’s an idea worth looking into – perhaps there is a way that a spaceport could be created at Front Range without requiring such things. Unfortunately, I doubt our current legislature will do it, and if they do, I fear the bloated, corrupt, ineffectual result that would come of any such effort.

[video h/t Clark Lindsey]

To encourage commercial cargo runs, NASA has hired SpaceX and a second company, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp. to fly cargo to the space station, a $100 billion project of 16 countries, which orbits about 240 miles above Earth.

A successful test flight by SpaceX — as well as a similar run by Orbital scheduled for next year — would begin restoring U.S. access to the station, which is expected to remain operational until at least 2020.

As others have pointed out, space policy is the one area where the Obama administration seems to be getting things more or less right – and that’s all the more amazing for it involving commercial endeavors. (It’s early, of course – if and when these commercial startups hit their stride, that will be when the federal government starts taxing and regulating them out of business like every other successful industry.)

Lockheed Martin [NYSE:LMT] has been selected by the U.S. Air Force for a contract award to support the Reusable Booster System (RBS) Flight and Ground Experiments program. The value of the first task order is $2 million, with a contract ordering value of up to $250 million over the five-year indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract period. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center are developing the RBS as the next generation launch vehicle that will significantly improve the affordability, operability, and responsiveness of future spacelift capabilities over current expendable launchers.

Initial RBS Flight and Ground Experiments task orders will provide for an RBS flight demonstration vehicle called RBS Pathfinder scheduled to launch in 2015. The RBS Pathfinder is an innovative reusable, winged, rocket-powered flight test vehicle that will demonstrate the Reusable Booster Systems’ “rocketback” maneuver capabilities and validate the system requirements that will drive refinements in the design of the operational RBS.

I have no knowledge of this program, but whether it’s a first stage or even just a strap-on akin to what was proposed numerous times to replace the Shuttle’s SRBs, it’s one promising step towards increased reusability, and thus affordable access to space.

Hmm…sorta makes one wonder why USAF is doing this and not NASA…

ADDED: the concept picture here suggests that it isn’t a first stage. Which makes sense: start with a small vehicle as a replacement for (say) EELV strap-ons, work out the kinks, and then progress to larger and more complex versions.

During the Constellation years, Marshall worked with the Department of Energy on nuclear-power technology that might one day power a lunar outpost. While Los Alamos and other national labs handled the radioactive material, NASA experts here used heating elements to simulate nuclear fuel and concentrated on the power systems that would generate electricity on the Moon.

That work continues, but it has expanded to encompass another technology goal under the new Obama policy: advanced in-space propulsion. In a nondescript high-bay building, the power-plant team has installed a nuclear-thermal rocket environmental simulator, which flows gaseous hydrogen over heating elements that mimic different nuclear-fuel configurations. The idea is to test the way different materials react with the hydrogen at high temperature and pressure.

Unfortunately, given the mindless apocalyptic hysteria that greets any use of nuclear materials in space nowadays (such as fretting about the MSL rover being a potential “Fukushima in space”…no, really…someone actually wrote that…), it probably won’t be possible to build and use in-space nuclear propulsion until it can actually be done in-space.

I haven’t looked into the abundance of uranium on the moon, but I’m guessing that even if it were as abundant and accessable there as on Earth it would be a while before there is a suitable industrial base to support this use…

(Note that the accompanying photo is not of Marshall but of Michoud, which to my knowledge has no connection to nuclear propulsion programs.)

A free society will not function or maintain itself unless its members regard it as right that each individual occupy the position that results from his action and accept it as due to his own action. Though it can offer to the individual only chances and though the outcome of his efforts will depend on innumerable accidents, it forcefully directs his attention to those circumstances that he can control as if they were the only ones that mattered.

– Friedrich Hayek

You’d think that a civilization with the ability to cross interplanetary distances would, when encountering this set of circumstances (humans, on Earth, burning fossil fuels), simply mock us for using such inefficient and diffuse sources of energy, and provide us with matter-conversion cells or zero-point energy modules or something suitably science-fictiony, scoring a tidy profit on the trade.

(What…why would you assume the aliens wouldn’t be capitalists…?)

I did, however, catch a bit of commentary on the radio while running errands Friday afternoon. Not sure what show it was (didn’t recognize the host — name was something like “Joe Pax”), but I tuned in just in time to hear a rant about how the end of the Shuttle program without a replacement on hand was a national tragedy, and that it came about because Obama cancelled Bush’s space policy only because it was Bush’s space policy.

Let’s unpack that, shall we?

The “national tragedy” bit simply repeated the received (un)wisdom that the end of Shuttle = end of US manned space exploration. Not so — NASA civil servant astronauts will still be flying to the predominantly-US International Space Station for the foreseeable future, albeit via the Russian Soyuz. New domestically-built and -launched spacecraft are a couple years out, so yes, we won’t be able to send NASA astronauts up on American-made vehicles for a while, but that does not equate to the end of an American presence in space. This part, though, I can understand — if someone hasn’t been following post-Columbia space policy, it may seem as though we are simply shutting down the manned side of NASA and giving up on space.

The worse flaw in his argument is the assertion (very strongly and unambiguously made by the host) that Obama cancelled the policy because it was Bush’s. This is utter bullshit, which a few minutes of research would have revealed as such. The policy that Obama cancelled (in part) was Mike Griffin’s, not George W. Bush’s. (While it’s true that Griffin reported to Bush who was in turn ultimately responsible, Constellation was unquestionably Griffin’s ill-begotten baby.) Bush gave us the broad policy of the VSE, which was later hijacked at the implementation level by Mike Griffin for his own vanity projects — the crowning glory of which was his Ares I launcher.

Griffin’s Constellation architecture is what was largely cancelled in February 2010, and with good reason — it was ill-conceived, over-sold, over-budget, under-performing, and behind schedule (more on that last in a moment). Obama’s cancellation of Griffin’s program was arguably the only good thing the man has accomplished as President, and it was done not out of spite for his predecessor (which I admittedly wouldn’t put beyond him), but because of the aforementioned problems.

And this brings us to the “gap” in American manned access to space, which was the inspiration for the rant. Had it not been for Griffin’s Ares-based Constellation architecture and its follow-on effects on the design of Orion, Orion might well have been ready to fly by now, or at the least with a minimal “gap” between Shuttle flyout and Orion IOC. Constant redesigns of Ares I and trouble meeting its performance goals meant redesigns and ultimately the stripping down of Orion, which in turn led to schedule slips with the latter. Had Orion (whether in in the original lifting-body form or the Griffin-mandated capsule form) been directed to fly on an EELV — in-production rockets with known performance characteristics and much more benign flight environments — a good portion of its development schedule slip could have been avoided. Which means we would have had little if any “gap” to cause radio talk show hosts consternation, nor reason for said hosts to suspect partisan motivations behind a necessary shift in space policy.

To be fair, when I came back to the program about fifteen minutes later, the host was admitting (apparently at the prompting of a caller I had missed in the meantime) that the shift to a more commercial orientation for manned access to space was a welcome development. But rather than rethink his earlier foolishness, he stuck to his guns and (incredibly, for a supposedly right-wing, pro-business, free-markets type of host) expressed doubt that commercial providers could ever fill that role. Which is disappointing — if people who are supposed to favor private enterprise allow their “national greatness” emotional priorities take precedence over letting a new industry take root, who will defend the new industry against those who don’t favor private enterprise?

A really interesting collection of bloggers, including the director of the only free-market think-tank in Central Asia.

I guess one has to expect many differences from the source material, given that the producers don’t have a Lord of the Rings-scale budget with which to depict the “period” setting of the book — regrettably, since the “yesterday’s world of tomorrow” flavor of the book would have made for some noir/Deco/raygun gothic eye candy. The question is how well they’ve handled these differences and how consistent the differences are with the overall themes of the book — do the movies still tell the same fundamental story?

I am concerned a bit with the acting, though. It could be that the scenes shown just don’t match the urgent mood of the music used in the trailer, but the actors (particularly the one playing Dagny Taggart) seem a little too subdued for the lines they are speaking given the scenes in the book from which those lines are taken.

As for props, the one glimpse of the Rearden Metal bridge is intriguing (that has to be the single hardest object from the book to visualize, based on Rand’s description). On the other hand, the “device” from Starnesville looked pretty close to what I expected except for size — in the book, Dagny and Hank have to struggle to free it from the junk pile, and it is later shown wrapped in a tarp in Hank’s trunk. I guess I was expecting something about the size of a car’s engine block, but perhaps something the size of a coffee pot is actually more reasonable given that the device is an early engineering prototype.

NASA hasn’t yet (so far as I know) made a decision on a launch vehicle for Orion, a decision one would expect to be pretty straightforward given the two options on hand. The continuing resolution is probably the main factor, but my inner cynic wonders if knowing this was in the works is some small part of the reason it’s taken so long.