We Are A Go

by Hal_10000

Posted by dwex on 10/10/08 at 09:01 AM from

Come on, Hal. Private industry has been going to take over for NASA for more than a decade. Hasn’t happened, and doesn’t seem at all likely to happen. There was an opportunity for it, before the collapse of the commercial satellite market, but let’s get real.

What SpaceX is doing is cool. I’m glad they finally got into orbit. But there’s no real private launch sector. Besides Orbital and the nascent SpaceX, all you have is semi-privatized NASA/military/foreign boosters (Atlas, Delta, Proton, Soyuz, Ariane, Long March).

SpaceX is a long, long way from lunar. They’ve gotten 1 out of 4 attempted 1000lb-ish payloads into LEO. They’re going to hopefully be able to get a heavy-lift launch (from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center) next year, which will give them an MEO/GTO capability.

If anything, commercial space launch is the poster child for the utter failure of commercializing a major business that has no actual business case. NASA may have ludicrous amounts of problems, but that does nothing to change the fact that there is no real business case for commercial space, and there are already far too many players trying to play.

SpaceX will either fail completely with their heavey launch Falcon 9, or will be bought out by Boeing or LockMart.

None of which changes the fact that what SpaceX did is very cool.

Posted by on 10/10/08 at 09:07 AM from

As long as governments are running space exploration it will be an afterthought, and a poorly funded one at that.  Right now there a trillions of dollars that could be made by microgravity manufacturing and mining asteroids that is just being ignored.

Even our space observatory program seems pretty lame when you think about how few of them there are.

Posted by dwex on 10/10/08 at 09:23 AM from

So where’s all the private funding for that space exploration, SO? The ‘trillions for microgravity’ thing has also been going on for quite a while. Who’s ponying up the money to actually go capture some of it? Who’s got the business case?

Remember the whole SSTO thing? Remember those guys who were gonna buy up expended shuttle external tanks and build a microgravity platform out of them?

There is no business case. It’s an utter delusion that a commercial space industry is going to come to fruition in our lifetimes. Or our kids. Or probably even our grandkids.

NASA is clearly not standing in anyone’s way, as Orbital, ILS, SpaceX, etc have demonstrated. If you’re saying that the money is going to NASA that should be going to commercial space, well that’s not very free market, now is it?

Show me where there’s a business case for all these fancy decade-old theories.

Posted by on 10/10/08 at 09:52 AM from

Personally, I think NASA needs to be privatized, though I doubt that in today’s economy there would be many buyers.

Allowing the government to make these sorts of decisions about space industry basically ensures that nothing will ever happen.  Remember, these are the same idiots that decided that there was no market for cell phones…

Posted by dwex on 10/10/08 at 10:08 AM from

Personally, I think NASA needs to be privatized,

That would work fine, if there were actually a business case for $100B pure research initiatives like manned spaceflight and deep space probes. Again, show me some sort of business case for private/commercial space, beyond a handful of LEO satellites and the occasional GEO launch.

Remember, these are the same idiots that decided that there was no market for cell phones…

Umm, no. That was the McKinsey consultants at AT&T;:

Not as legendary or fateful a mistake as AT&T;’s, however. In 1980, the company whose Bell Labs invented cellphones listened to McKinsey, the consulting company they’d hired. Its estimate of the market in the year 2000 was off by a factor of 120—not even 1 percent of the real number. Based on that, AT&T;decided there wasn’t much future to these toys. Not coincidentally, in 2005, it was swallowed up by SBC Communications Inc., originally a Baby Bell.

Or this reference from Google Books. Blame the consultants, not the government. Nice try, though.

Posted by on 10/10/08 at 10:38 AM from

Actually, there was a government decision as well that also concluded that cell phones were a dead technology, so there was no need to sell bandwidth.  That AT&T;came to the same conclusion isn’t surprising since it was a stagnant corporation propped up by a government issued monopoly - sort of like the post office being outstripped by private competition.

As for commercial cases for space - at the very least they could put up more space observatories and rent out time on them.  Currently they can only support about 1/10th the requests for time on the Hubble, and it won’t be replaced for at least another 4 years.  Seriously, why are there so few of these things?  Are you saying that “by golly, only a government can afford this sort of stuff, or get it done right”?

Also, like all unexploited opportunities, the vast majority of it won’t be known until you actually get out there.

Posted by dwex on 10/10/08 at 11:39 AM from

Actually, there was a government decision as well that also concluded that cell phones were a dead technology, so there was no need to sell bandwidth. 

Show me a reference.

The entire concept of selling spectrum is fairly modern, and extremely controversial. At the time cellular technologies were being invented in the 1980s, no one even considered selling spectrum. Spectrum was a national resource licensed for the public good.

The idea that someone in government said “no one will use this, there’s no point in selling it” is ridiculous. Radio licenses were never sold. Television licenses were never sold. The cellular industry was a dozen or so years old before the “spectrum auction” idea came up.

Are you saying that “by golly, only a government can afford this sort of stuff, or get it done right”?

No, I’m saying lots of people seem to want it, yet no one has been able to make a business case to actually do it. When the government couldn’t handle rapid package delivery, even though they had a monopoly on mail, someone found a business case to create FedEx (which was a tad capital intensive).

People are signing up by the gazillions (well, thousands anyhow) for a 3-minute sub-orbital flight on Virgin Galactic. People are paying millions for a Soyuz trip to the station (although I think they’ve stopped that program for now).

Show me anyone putting up money to get time on a commercial space observatory. All these people who can’t get time on Hubble. Wait. They’re all doing pure research at Universities and have no money. There’s a business case in creating a space observatory for them?

If these things should be done for the public good (furthering pure research maybe), then that’s what NASA’s for. But for there to be a viable commercial enterprise, there kinda need to be customers willing to fork over money.

SpaceX is speculating that such a market will come into existence. So did ILS, Sea Launch and others for more than a decade. The market they thought they had fizzled, and shows basically no signs of recovering, and now there’s a glut of launch capacity and nothing to launch with it. This is why SpaceX is banking on selling launch services to NASA (via the Dragon transfer vehicle on the Falcon 9, initially).

Also, like all unexploited opportunities, the vast majority of it won’t be known until you actually get out there.

And yet, still no one seems to be able to come up with a business case for all this stuff people supposedly want.

You are asserting that these things are better handled in the private sector. I’m not disputing that. I’m disputing that there is any actual private sector interest in doing it, and challenging you to show me a business case, or even someone proposing a viable business case, for doing it.

Posted by on 10/10/08 at 01:13 PM from

Show me a reference.

Yeah, I keep a record of everything I read or heard or watched on the news over the last 30 years.  I’m sure that ALL of it is now online and I have a massive motivation to prove things to you.....

They’re all doing pure research at Universities and have no money. There’s a business case in creating a space observatory for them?

Have no money my ass.  Just because it hasn’t been done yet doesn’t mean you couldn’t sell time for a space observatory.  Wouldn’t even have to be that great of one.  These people get research grants all the fucking time.  If it suddenly cost a bit of cash to get data now rather than in a decade, or never, money would get kicked loose for it.

I’m disputing that there is any actual private sector interest in doing it, and challenging you to show me a business case, or even someone proposing a viable business case, for doing it.

There may not be any at this time, but that doesn’t mean my original point isn’t valid.  There are potential markets out there that have been stymied and ignored - waiting for NASA to get the ball rolling is the same thing as giving up.

Posted by dwex on 10/10/08 at 01:40 PM from

Yeah, I keep a record of everything I read or heard or watched on the news over the last 30 years.  I’m sure that ALL of it is now online and I have a massive motivation to prove things to you.....

OMG, that’s astonishly fucking weak. If Google is too tough for you, just stop now. Took me like 30 seconds to find the refences to blow up your inane assertions.

Repeat after me - “I was talking out my ass, dwex, who’s worked in telecommunications for 20ish years on and off, actually was right and cited sources to back it up”.

Just because it hasn’t been done yet doesn’t mean you couldn’t sell time for a space observatory.

And yet, after all this time, after a decade+ of talking about commercial space platforms, no one has been able to get sufficient commitment to buy time on said platform to be able to formulate a business plan to actually do it. This at a time when the glut of available launch capacity has had launch prices at historically low levels (not that they’re ever cheap, but relatively speaking).

There may not be any at this time, but that doesn’t mean my original point isn’t valid.  There are potential markets out there that have been stymied and ignored - waiting for NASA to get the ball rolling is the same thing as giving up.

But you still cannot cite one example. Or is this another case of where you’d rather spew than look things up and provide a citation?

Here I thought I might actually get an actual debate out of you for once.

Again - weak.