Space Access Notes: Day Two, Part Two
Ok, back to slogging through getting my Space Access Notes up for everyone. For sake of brevity, and since you're all also being bombarded by reports from ISDC, and since a bunch of people have alredy blogged about a lot of this, and since most of it is now old news (I mean, that was sooo last month!), I'm going to skip a lot.
Chuck Lauer:RocketPlane/Kistler
Others have already covered most of the details from Chuck's presentation, particularly about RocketPlane's progress. The main thing of interest to me was the whole Kistler purchase. Now, I've heard rumors going around the web that they got a really sweet deal for Kistler (I heard single-digit millions, but I don't have a source for that number). Chuck was saying that they would like to have the K-1 entering flight testing by late 2008. However that was only if they land some funding from COTS. If not, they still want to go through with it, but on a much slower pace.
Basically, my take on the whole thing is that this was a very wise business move on their part. For a couple million they buy themselves into the orbital game, with a chance at winning part of the "C" prize to go along with the "O" prize they already landed. Relatively low-cost, potentially high-reward. If they don't get any bites from NASA, they can at least borrow some technology (or leverage some of the Kistler assets) to help get XP flying sooner.
By the way, Clark mentions that RpK (as they're calling themselves) is going to have to do initial flights from Australia to prove out the parachute landing system, because the FAA considers it to be an uncontrolled landing. Maybe down the road we could convince them to ditch the parachutes, and buy a vertical landing kit from us to trick out their K-1's with. Cause face it, everyone knows that Real Men (TM) land on Big Herkin Pillars of Hot Flamey Stuff, not on namby-pamby airbags. ;-)
Rick Tumlinson: Teachers in Space
Next up was "Reverend Rick" (or was it Bill Boland) of the Space Frontiers Foundation pitching their Teachers in Space program. I think this is a pretty interesting idea. Basically, they're planning on raising donations from private and government entities to fly teachers into space on suborbital rockets. The main point they presented was how this would help inspire future students, etc. The unmentioned point was that this would also help provide additional revenue for private spaceflight. Not just from the fact that when the teachers fly and come back and get their students excited that it'll eventually wind up causing more people to want to fly into space. Once commercial spaceflight takes off, it'll take some time to ramp up, and during that time having an extra 100 flights per year worth of demand (that isn't necessarily coming out of the pockets of the demographic that is buying the rest of the tickets, so this isn't diluting their demand any) is going to make a bit difference.
I liked the fact that Armadillo, XCOR, and RkP all donated tickets to the cause. It's a little symbolic, since none of them have yet flown a paying passenger, and none of them will for at least another 1-3 years. But symbolism counts.
Jeff Hamilton:MSFC/Michoud
Jeff was basically pitching the idea that MSFC and Michoud are trying to get more alt.space companies interested in working with them. It's good to see that they're starting to see some of the handwriting on the wall. Jeff mentioned that they have lots of manufacturing capability that can be contracted. Stuff like metal spinning, friction stir welding, tank design/analysis, use of rocket test stands, etc. The FSW stuff is particularly interesting to me, since that was one of the "hot topics" for research there at the BYU ME department when I was there. It's good to see the technology now entering prime-time, and it would be cool to have stuff like that available to some of the smaller alt.space companies. One that front, Jeff mentioned some good news. Apparently, MSFC and Michoud are trying to move away from "Full Cost Accounting" to "Marginal Cost Accounting", which should help immensely with lowering the cost of doing business with them. The other nice thing they mentioned was that contracting to use Michoud's facility wasn't even done through NASA or LockMart, but is handled instead by National Center for Advanced Manufacturing.
Oh, and he gave out free samples of stir-welded pieces and small composite panels as business cards. How cool is that?
Jeff Greason:XCOR
I'm really glad to see how well XCOR is doing now. They seem to have finally turned a serious corner this past year, and I think we'll be seeing exciting stuff from them in the near future. And if anyone deserves success, it'd be Jeff and his team.
Anyhow, Jeff talked a bit about all the various rocket vehicles and components they're working on, as well as the big-picture financially. They had over $1M in revenue for 2005, and will likely top $3-4M this year. The coolest news is that they've already got about half of the capital they need to build Xerus.
He talked about lots of projects that are fairly well known, such as their pumps, their engines, igniters, and the composite LOX tanks stuff they're working on. XCOR is kind of like us. They really wish they could buy a lot of this stuff off-the-shelf, but nobody is selling it, so they have to develop it (They'd also like to sell the stuff they have developed to the rest of us now that they've made it, but that's more complicated). Jeff really hit on the importance of more horizontal integration in the market, and we are finally starting to see some of that.
Regarding the LOX tanks, they did mention one last interesting problem they're trying to resolve for the manufacturing, and that is how do you get the mandrel out once you've fillament wound the thing? Apparently they're using a Teflon-like thermoplastic as the matrix, so they end up using fairly high temperatures during the process, which eliminate a lot of the normal techniques for mandrels. They want to avoid using nasty toxic materials. I mentioned carbonyls when I was at their shop on the way home from the conference, and while interesting, they pointed out how nasty that stuff was to work with. I wonder if they could use some sort of water-soluble sand-core like we used in the foundary? I remember making cores for casting some cylinders once. We used a water-soluble resin to hold some fine sand together, which was then placed in the sand-casting molds where we wanted to leave voids. The stuff was annoying to deal with, but it worked fine even at molten metal temperatures (but whoo-boy, make sure you've got all the liquid evaporated out of it before you pour the metal in or you're in for an exciting fireworks show--particularly with cast iron, but I digress). Anyhow, if any of you have any suggestions, I think at least some of the XCOR guys occasionally read this blog, so you can just drop ideas in the comments section if you'd like.
The other interesting component thing mentioned in passing in Jeff's presentation was valves. I hadn't heard before that they were working on valves (and he didn't really say anything about it there at the conference), but I got to see what he was talking about when we dropped in on their shop on the way home from the conference. Apparently they've had some of the same annoying problems as many other groups have had with commercial off-the-shelf cryo valves, so they worked with another company, CazTek to design a really sweet, light-weight, higher quality ball valve. It may have been the anodization, but man those things looked nice. The whole thing, with a LOX valve, a fuel valve, the actuator to drive both of them, and with all the attachments for purge, prime, igniter tap-offs, and sensor taps brazed in weighed like 2-3lb at the most. I'm going to have to find out how much XCOR and CazTek are willing to sell some of those for...
The coolest thing going on with XCOR is the whole Rocket Racing League. I hear that Burt Rutan dissed on it by claiming it wasn't cutting any new technology, but well, it's ok to be wrong, I guess. The whole RRL concept, if succesful, is going to do several really good things for the industry. First, it'll bring in sponsorship money for various teams. Second, it'll drive efforts to develop more and more operable and more and more reliable rockets. Third, it'll provide a steady stream of rocket technicians who know how to service RLVs. Most importantly though, it'll provide enough of a customer base for many of these rocket parts to make them more affordable for the rest of us.
That last point can't be overemphasized, IMO. A lot of outsiders like badmouthing alt.space companies for always trying to develop stuff in-house, and not buying stuff from each other. Even ignoring all the minor details like the fact that there really are differences between the various vehicle concepts that make many components not directly interchangable, and the fact that doing some in-house development of some subsystems can provide invaluable insights into designing the overall vehicle, there are still problems with just buying from other alt.space companies. The biggest one being that there isn't enough of a customer base, so you end up having to pay for most of the NRE costs for the component. Nobody is going to sell components to a potential competitor at a loss, and there are real costs that have to be recouped. There are a lot of components that XCOR makes that we would have loved to be in a position to buy from them. The problem is that since we'd be their only customer for a lot of those items, they would have cost us just as much or more than developing them in-house. It's not like XCOR is trying to gouge us or anything--Jeff wants to sell us stuff. It's just the reality of how small this market is. And RRL has a chance to change that. Imagine what happens once there are a dozen companies all of which have bought a couple dozen torch igniters from XCOR. How much cheaper will it be to be the next customer? Trust me, it'll be a lot cheaper.
So, I really wish XCOR and the Rocket Racing League luck on this. It'll mean a lot for the industry as a whole, and will move things more towards the day when you can build a suborbital rocket out of catalog parts. :-) Spacecraft Spruce anyone? Or General Spacecraft Hardware maybe?
George Nield:FAA AST
So much for brevity, eh? Well, I'll try again. George hit on a few really potentially interesting things AST is working on. A big one is that they are working on a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement that'll cover a lot of the potential environmental impacts of RLVs. The good news is that this should greatly streamline the EIS portion of getting a launch license (which was mentioned at previous Space Access conference as being one of the big remaining annoyances with the licensing process), and more importantly could eventually lead to some categorical exemptions for some types of RLVs. That would be huge. Though that would mean Burt would have to stop complaining about how the AST forced him to do all that paperwork about endangered turtles.
The other big news was that the time for comment on the Human Spaceflight NPRM is now past, but that they've now started taking comments on the Experimental Permit NPRM. Having now gone through this process once, it does take time (and a bit of masochism) to read through these things, think about the ramifications, and write constructive comments, but it is definitely worth it. I'm going to have to see if I can find time to comment on this one too. One good piece of news regarding the Experimental Permit though is that advertising is exempted from the ban on for-profit flights under a permit (something about it falling under the category of flights for "goodwill" or something legalistic like that).
Dave Masten: Masten Space Systems (My Boss)
I'm not going to spend a lot of time potlatching about what we've been up to (since I've already talked a bunch on the companyblog and this one). But it is cool to see how much progress we've made in a year, in spite of being stuck in a really lousy testing situation. Just one year ago today we finally had our first set of succesful igniter tests where we had a bunch of firings without burning out spark plugs or anything else. Since then we've gone through about a dozen igniter design iterations (and fired them somewhere upwards of 3000 times now), have gone through four engine iterations (with over 200 firings total, some as long as 40 seconds or more), have an engine that has reached thermal steady state at full throttle (with darned nice performance), and that was capable of throttling down substantially (all without variable injector geometries or anything fancy like that), and have a vehicle 1/2 way built in the back of our shop. Oh and we now have a working actuator system.
The sad thing is how much more we likely could have gotten done in that time if we had been in a place like Texas or Mojave where firing a rocket engine out of the back of your shop door is not considered to be anti-social behavior. Even with how helpful the owner of our current remote test site has been (and trust me, he's been very helpful and patient with us), having a test site that's more than 90 minutes drive from your shop makes everything about 10 times slower. I'm really looking forward to moving down to Mojave this summer. The whole thought of being able to fix and debug engines and vehicles as fast as we were able to jam away on the igniter (which we were able to test in our shop) is really, really cool.
Jerry Pournelle
I missed out on most of Jerry's talk (had to take little Jonny out to go splash in the fountains for a bit), but I did catch one really good point near the end. Jerry pointed out that there are two kinds of people in any organization: those dedicated to the goals of the organization, and those dedicated to the organization itself. He pointed out that usually the second kind end up on top. Kind of explains what's wrong with NASA pretty well, doesn't it? It also kind of shows the dangers of shallow patriotism/nationalism....but that's dangerously off-topic for this blog, so I'll end it there.
Tim Bendell: Frontier Astronautics
Tim's company is doing the ACS for our vehicle, and I've been really impressed by how well he knows his stuff. Their company is one of those positive examples of budding horizontal integration in the alt.space industry.
Tim probably had the coolest announcement of the whole conference. Basically, he bought an old Atlas-E missle silo outside of Chugwater, Wyoming, and is trying to turn it into a spaceport/rocket development center. It's located 5 miles down a nicely paved road from I-25, yet there are only about 11 people within a three mile radius of the site. It's lower population density than Mojave Spaceport by a long-shot. Not to mention indoors 24/7/365 testing of rocket engines up into the thousands of pounds thrust range? Nice. Very nice.
When we first heard about this a couple of months ago, I ran some quick numbers and realized that if you had a two-stage vehicle, where the first stage had fly-back capabilities, that you could launch into an ISS orbit from there without passing anywhere near any major cities for thousands of miles--ie your Ec would be so low that you could probably get a launch license even before you've proven that your launch vehicle has a reliability greater than 0%. It really got me thinking. If you aren't intentionally dropping trash (expended stages) on people, and if you don't insist on launching into the absolutely most efficient orbital inclination possible, there are actually a lot of potential inland orbital launch locations.
I really hope that Tim does well with the Chugwater Spaceport idea. He may beat Mojave to being the first town in the world that has more rocket companies than fast food restaurants. :-)
Economic Fallacies Panel: aka Econ 101 for Rocket Nerds
This panel degenerated really fast into a flamewar toward the end, and a lot of it was just reviewing basic econ that everyone who's been through college should know, but before that there was at least one new and valuable thought discussed. That was the importance of planning for diversity. I think it was Joan Horvath who made this point. Basically, her point was that for a sustainable economic development of space, there can't just be one or two killer aps. Monocultures aren't good ecosystems. We really need to have eight or ten or more major markets to have a healthy space economy.
Anyway, it's almost 2:30 AM here, which ironically was about how late I ended up staying on that night of the conference too....Methinks its time to go to bed.
Chuck Lauer:RocketPlane/Kistler
Others have already covered most of the details from Chuck's presentation, particularly about RocketPlane's progress. The main thing of interest to me was the whole Kistler purchase. Now, I've heard rumors going around the web that they got a really sweet deal for Kistler (I heard single-digit millions, but I don't have a source for that number). Chuck was saying that they would like to have the K-1 entering flight testing by late 2008. However that was only if they land some funding from COTS. If not, they still want to go through with it, but on a much slower pace.
Basically, my take on the whole thing is that this was a very wise business move on their part. For a couple million they buy themselves into the orbital game, with a chance at winning part of the "C" prize to go along with the "O" prize they already landed. Relatively low-cost, potentially high-reward. If they don't get any bites from NASA, they can at least borrow some technology (or leverage some of the Kistler assets) to help get XP flying sooner.
By the way, Clark mentions that RpK (as they're calling themselves) is going to have to do initial flights from Australia to prove out the parachute landing system, because the FAA considers it to be an uncontrolled landing. Maybe down the road we could convince them to ditch the parachutes, and buy a vertical landing kit from us to trick out their K-1's with. Cause face it, everyone knows that Real Men (TM) land on Big Herkin Pillars of Hot Flamey Stuff, not on namby-pamby airbags. ;-)
Rick Tumlinson: Teachers in Space
Next up was "Reverend Rick" (or was it Bill Boland) of the Space Frontiers Foundation pitching their Teachers in Space program. I think this is a pretty interesting idea. Basically, they're planning on raising donations from private and government entities to fly teachers into space on suborbital rockets. The main point they presented was how this would help inspire future students, etc. The unmentioned point was that this would also help provide additional revenue for private spaceflight. Not just from the fact that when the teachers fly and come back and get their students excited that it'll eventually wind up causing more people to want to fly into space. Once commercial spaceflight takes off, it'll take some time to ramp up, and during that time having an extra 100 flights per year worth of demand (that isn't necessarily coming out of the pockets of the demographic that is buying the rest of the tickets, so this isn't diluting their demand any) is going to make a bit difference.
I liked the fact that Armadillo, XCOR, and RkP all donated tickets to the cause. It's a little symbolic, since none of them have yet flown a paying passenger, and none of them will for at least another 1-3 years. But symbolism counts.
Jeff Hamilton:MSFC/Michoud
Jeff was basically pitching the idea that MSFC and Michoud are trying to get more alt.space companies interested in working with them. It's good to see that they're starting to see some of the handwriting on the wall. Jeff mentioned that they have lots of manufacturing capability that can be contracted. Stuff like metal spinning, friction stir welding, tank design/analysis, use of rocket test stands, etc. The FSW stuff is particularly interesting to me, since that was one of the "hot topics" for research there at the BYU ME department when I was there. It's good to see the technology now entering prime-time, and it would be cool to have stuff like that available to some of the smaller alt.space companies. One that front, Jeff mentioned some good news. Apparently, MSFC and Michoud are trying to move away from "Full Cost Accounting" to "Marginal Cost Accounting", which should help immensely with lowering the cost of doing business with them. The other nice thing they mentioned was that contracting to use Michoud's facility wasn't even done through NASA or LockMart, but is handled instead by National Center for Advanced Manufacturing.
Oh, and he gave out free samples of stir-welded pieces and small composite panels as business cards. How cool is that?
Jeff Greason:XCOR
I'm really glad to see how well XCOR is doing now. They seem to have finally turned a serious corner this past year, and I think we'll be seeing exciting stuff from them in the near future. And if anyone deserves success, it'd be Jeff and his team.
Anyhow, Jeff talked a bit about all the various rocket vehicles and components they're working on, as well as the big-picture financially. They had over $1M in revenue for 2005, and will likely top $3-4M this year. The coolest news is that they've already got about half of the capital they need to build Xerus.
He talked about lots of projects that are fairly well known, such as their pumps, their engines, igniters, and the composite LOX tanks stuff they're working on. XCOR is kind of like us. They really wish they could buy a lot of this stuff off-the-shelf, but nobody is selling it, so they have to develop it (They'd also like to sell the stuff they have developed to the rest of us now that they've made it, but that's more complicated). Jeff really hit on the importance of more horizontal integration in the market, and we are finally starting to see some of that.
Regarding the LOX tanks, they did mention one last interesting problem they're trying to resolve for the manufacturing, and that is how do you get the mandrel out once you've fillament wound the thing? Apparently they're using a Teflon-like thermoplastic as the matrix, so they end up using fairly high temperatures during the process, which eliminate a lot of the normal techniques for mandrels. They want to avoid using nasty toxic materials. I mentioned carbonyls when I was at their shop on the way home from the conference, and while interesting, they pointed out how nasty that stuff was to work with. I wonder if they could use some sort of water-soluble sand-core like we used in the foundary? I remember making cores for casting some cylinders once. We used a water-soluble resin to hold some fine sand together, which was then placed in the sand-casting molds where we wanted to leave voids. The stuff was annoying to deal with, but it worked fine even at molten metal temperatures (but whoo-boy, make sure you've got all the liquid evaporated out of it before you pour the metal in or you're in for an exciting fireworks show--particularly with cast iron, but I digress). Anyhow, if any of you have any suggestions, I think at least some of the XCOR guys occasionally read this blog, so you can just drop ideas in the comments section if you'd like.
The other interesting component thing mentioned in passing in Jeff's presentation was valves. I hadn't heard before that they were working on valves (and he didn't really say anything about it there at the conference), but I got to see what he was talking about when we dropped in on their shop on the way home from the conference. Apparently they've had some of the same annoying problems as many other groups have had with commercial off-the-shelf cryo valves, so they worked with another company, CazTek to design a really sweet, light-weight, higher quality ball valve. It may have been the anodization, but man those things looked nice. The whole thing, with a LOX valve, a fuel valve, the actuator to drive both of them, and with all the attachments for purge, prime, igniter tap-offs, and sensor taps brazed in weighed like 2-3lb at the most. I'm going to have to find out how much XCOR and CazTek are willing to sell some of those for...
The coolest thing going on with XCOR is the whole Rocket Racing League. I hear that Burt Rutan dissed on it by claiming it wasn't cutting any new technology, but well, it's ok to be wrong, I guess. The whole RRL concept, if succesful, is going to do several really good things for the industry. First, it'll bring in sponsorship money for various teams. Second, it'll drive efforts to develop more and more operable and more and more reliable rockets. Third, it'll provide a steady stream of rocket technicians who know how to service RLVs. Most importantly though, it'll provide enough of a customer base for many of these rocket parts to make them more affordable for the rest of us.
That last point can't be overemphasized, IMO. A lot of outsiders like badmouthing alt.space companies for always trying to develop stuff in-house, and not buying stuff from each other. Even ignoring all the minor details like the fact that there really are differences between the various vehicle concepts that make many components not directly interchangable, and the fact that doing some in-house development of some subsystems can provide invaluable insights into designing the overall vehicle, there are still problems with just buying from other alt.space companies. The biggest one being that there isn't enough of a customer base, so you end up having to pay for most of the NRE costs for the component. Nobody is going to sell components to a potential competitor at a loss, and there are real costs that have to be recouped. There are a lot of components that XCOR makes that we would have loved to be in a position to buy from them. The problem is that since we'd be their only customer for a lot of those items, they would have cost us just as much or more than developing them in-house. It's not like XCOR is trying to gouge us or anything--Jeff wants to sell us stuff. It's just the reality of how small this market is. And RRL has a chance to change that. Imagine what happens once there are a dozen companies all of which have bought a couple dozen torch igniters from XCOR. How much cheaper will it be to be the next customer? Trust me, it'll be a lot cheaper.
So, I really wish XCOR and the Rocket Racing League luck on this. It'll mean a lot for the industry as a whole, and will move things more towards the day when you can build a suborbital rocket out of catalog parts. :-) Spacecraft Spruce anyone? Or General Spacecraft Hardware maybe?
George Nield:FAA AST
So much for brevity, eh? Well, I'll try again. George hit on a few really potentially interesting things AST is working on. A big one is that they are working on a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement that'll cover a lot of the potential environmental impacts of RLVs. The good news is that this should greatly streamline the EIS portion of getting a launch license (which was mentioned at previous Space Access conference as being one of the big remaining annoyances with the licensing process), and more importantly could eventually lead to some categorical exemptions for some types of RLVs. That would be huge. Though that would mean Burt would have to stop complaining about how the AST forced him to do all that paperwork about endangered turtles.
The other big news was that the time for comment on the Human Spaceflight NPRM is now past, but that they've now started taking comments on the Experimental Permit NPRM. Having now gone through this process once, it does take time (and a bit of masochism) to read through these things, think about the ramifications, and write constructive comments, but it is definitely worth it. I'm going to have to see if I can find time to comment on this one too. One good piece of news regarding the Experimental Permit though is that advertising is exempted from the ban on for-profit flights under a permit (something about it falling under the category of flights for "goodwill" or something legalistic like that).
Dave Masten: Masten Space Systems (My Boss)
I'm not going to spend a lot of time potlatching about what we've been up to (since I've already talked a bunch on the companyblog and this one). But it is cool to see how much progress we've made in a year, in spite of being stuck in a really lousy testing situation. Just one year ago today we finally had our first set of succesful igniter tests where we had a bunch of firings without burning out spark plugs or anything else. Since then we've gone through about a dozen igniter design iterations (and fired them somewhere upwards of 3000 times now), have gone through four engine iterations (with over 200 firings total, some as long as 40 seconds or more), have an engine that has reached thermal steady state at full throttle (with darned nice performance), and that was capable of throttling down substantially (all without variable injector geometries or anything fancy like that), and have a vehicle 1/2 way built in the back of our shop. Oh and we now have a working actuator system.
The sad thing is how much more we likely could have gotten done in that time if we had been in a place like Texas or Mojave where firing a rocket engine out of the back of your shop door is not considered to be anti-social behavior. Even with how helpful the owner of our current remote test site has been (and trust me, he's been very helpful and patient with us), having a test site that's more than 90 minutes drive from your shop makes everything about 10 times slower. I'm really looking forward to moving down to Mojave this summer. The whole thought of being able to fix and debug engines and vehicles as fast as we were able to jam away on the igniter (which we were able to test in our shop) is really, really cool.
Jerry Pournelle
I missed out on most of Jerry's talk (had to take little Jonny out to go splash in the fountains for a bit), but I did catch one really good point near the end. Jerry pointed out that there are two kinds of people in any organization: those dedicated to the goals of the organization, and those dedicated to the organization itself. He pointed out that usually the second kind end up on top. Kind of explains what's wrong with NASA pretty well, doesn't it? It also kind of shows the dangers of shallow patriotism/nationalism....but that's dangerously off-topic for this blog, so I'll end it there.
Tim Bendell: Frontier Astronautics
Tim's company is doing the ACS for our vehicle, and I've been really impressed by how well he knows his stuff. Their company is one of those positive examples of budding horizontal integration in the alt.space industry.
Tim probably had the coolest announcement of the whole conference. Basically, he bought an old Atlas-E missle silo outside of Chugwater, Wyoming, and is trying to turn it into a spaceport/rocket development center. It's located 5 miles down a nicely paved road from I-25, yet there are only about 11 people within a three mile radius of the site. It's lower population density than Mojave Spaceport by a long-shot. Not to mention indoors 24/7/365 testing of rocket engines up into the thousands of pounds thrust range? Nice. Very nice.
When we first heard about this a couple of months ago, I ran some quick numbers and realized that if you had a two-stage vehicle, where the first stage had fly-back capabilities, that you could launch into an ISS orbit from there without passing anywhere near any major cities for thousands of miles--ie your Ec would be so low that you could probably get a launch license even before you've proven that your launch vehicle has a reliability greater than 0%. It really got me thinking. If you aren't intentionally dropping trash (expended stages) on people, and if you don't insist on launching into the absolutely most efficient orbital inclination possible, there are actually a lot of potential inland orbital launch locations.
I really hope that Tim does well with the Chugwater Spaceport idea. He may beat Mojave to being the first town in the world that has more rocket companies than fast food restaurants. :-)
Economic Fallacies Panel: aka Econ 101 for Rocket Nerds
This panel degenerated really fast into a flamewar toward the end, and a lot of it was just reviewing basic econ that everyone who's been through college should know, but before that there was at least one new and valuable thought discussed. That was the importance of planning for diversity. I think it was Joan Horvath who made this point. Basically, her point was that for a sustainable economic development of space, there can't just be one or two killer aps. Monocultures aren't good ecosystems. We really need to have eight or ten or more major markets to have a healthy space economy.
Anyway, it's almost 2:30 AM here, which ironically was about how late I ended up staying on that night of the conference too....Methinks its time to go to bed.
posted by Jon Goff at 12:50 AM
2 Comments:
JG:
"there are still problems with just
buying from other alt.space
companies. The biggest one being
that there isn't enough of a
customer base, so you end up having
to pay for most of the NRE costs for
the component."
I think this is a potential point of
work for alt.space - reducing the
ratio of NRE to unit cost for
low-volume high-tech manufacturing.
(Of course, this would involve
spending effort on improving
high-flexibility CAD/CAM art-to-
part" systems and similar capacities instead of dealing with vehicle
configurations and mission marketing
models, so it's perhaps not
surprising that this "meta-task" hasn't received more attention than
it has, from people who want to do
vehicles... but it could be a great
enabler of vehicle projects: being
able to draw a design and produce it
without the premium cost generally
associated with 'low-volume custom'
fabrication!)
Nobody is going to sell components to a potential competitor at a loss, and there are real costs that have to be recouped.
The problem isn't that the company selling the parts has to recoup their NRE cost. The NRE cost is a sunk cost. The problem is that if that's the only company with the part, they can charge you up to a price based on your NRE cost.
It's a monopoly situation. The solution is to have at least two companies that could provide the part. In that case, absent collusion, the price should decline toward the marginal cost of production.
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