Page Created: 02/11/14. Last Updated: 02/11/14.
2012 INTERNATIONAL SPACE DEVELOPMENT CONFERENCE
The following article is reprinted with permission from:
THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
06/22/12 -- Vol. 30, No. 52, Whole Number 1707
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International Space Development Conference 2012 (Huntsville, May 25-May 28) (report by Dale L. Skran, Jr.)
International Space Development Conference 2012 Copyright 2012 Dale L. Skran Jr.
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Now is the Time--Today is the Day! (report on the 2012 International Space Development Conference, May 25-28, 2012, by Dale L. Skran, Jr.)
Recently I attended ISDC 2012 in Washington, DC. This was the first ISDC I have attended that coincided with a major space milestone. The SpaceX Dragon capsule was grappled by the ISS (International Space Station) robot arm the morning of Friday, May 25th during the speech being given by Charlie Bolden, NASA administrator, to the ISDC audience. I give General Bolden great credit for speaking to the ISDC while his team was executing a critical and challenging milestone.
The berthing of the Dragon with the ISS marks the first time a privately built spaceship has delivered supplies to this international laboratory. Previously, supplies were delivered by Russian, European, and Japanese robotic ships, and the American Space Shuttle, now retired from service. NASA has decided to, rather than build a new government rocket to supply the ISS, instead rely on services provided by two private companies, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences. SpaceX has built and tested a new rocket-- the Falcon 9--and a new capsule--the Dragon--at a fraction of the
billions of dollars normally associated with space ventures.
The success of the Falcon/Dragon heralds a day when governments no longer control access to space, which instead will be available to anyone who can afford to go--and at a price much lower than ever before. The Falcon/Dragon will eventually loft astronauts to the ISS for a cost of about $20 million per person. This may seem like a lot, but it is much less than Russia is currently charging the US per astronaut to the ISS--$63 million per seat!! (<http://tinyurl.com/void-nasa-soyuz>).
Sadly, although this news was greeted with great enthusiasm at the ISDC, the halls of Congress produced only muted praise as many there see SpaceX not as the basis of an affordable and expansive future in space but only as the end of jobs in their home districts.
Bolden's talk at the ISDC was followed by Mark Sirangelo, the Chairman of Sierra Nevada Space Systems. Sierra Nevada is building one of the four vehicles--the Dream Chaser--competing to provide private astronaut access to the ISS (the other three are SpaceX, Boeing, and Blue Origin). The Dream Chaser derives from the HL10 (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_HL-10>) developed by NASA in the 1970s. The Dream Chaser launches vertically on an Atlas 5 and lands horizontally on a runway. Among its many advantages are:
- No usage of solid rockets attached to the Atlas 5 booster
- Can last 3.5 days in orbit before docking to the ISS
- No poisonous rocket fuels--unlike the Space Shuttle
- Can last 210 days attached to the Space Station
- 1.5 G landings--very low compared to capsules.
Mark's talk was excellent. Just a few days after the ISDC the Dream Chaser completed captive carry tests, i.e., suspended from a large aircraft via a cable. The Dream Chaser is the kind of doable and potentially reliable project that NASA could never complete, because NASA tends to be driven to be all things to all people.
The next big name speaker was Steve Cook of Dynetics. His talk was delayed a bit by an impromptu report from SpaceX on the successful berthing of Dragon with the ISS. Cook gave a general report on the activities of his company, which operates out of Huntsville, Alabama and has many aerospace products. Of the greatest interest to ISDC attendees, Dynetics is system integrator for a new project called "Stratolauncher." Stratolauncher is funded by Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft. The Stratolauncher will consist of the world's largest airplane--the
engines from two 747s fused together with a Scaled Composites double-hull similar to the White Knight carrier aircraft for Space Ship One--carrying a Falcon 9 booster in the middle. The general intention of this new company is to provide cost-effective Delta-2 class launch services without requiring a launch pad. Check out <http://stratolaunch.com/> for more information.
The Friday lunch speaker was Eric Anderson, Co-Chairman and Co- Founder of Planetary Resources, a company that recentlyannounced plans to mine asteroids. Funded by a gaggle of billionaires, including the founders of Google, Planetary Resources envisions a three-step plan to exploit the resources of asteroids:
- Launch swarms of low-cost telescopes for optical asteroid surveys
- Launch swarms of low-cost asteroid probes, and
- Return an asteroid to the Earth-Moon system for resource extraction.
Their focus is on mining water for the manufacture of rocket fuel, and also on extracting platinum-group metals. You can learn more about this exciting new company at <http://www.planetaryresources.com/>.
By 2PM on the first day of the conference, the ISDC had already seen more solid space development excitement than any five-year period in the 1990s, including the Dragon's honest-to-goodness real historic space milestone occurring live on TV while the ISDC attendees watched.
To start the afternoon, I moved to the Space Investment Summit track with the 3PM panel "Policy Implications for Commercial Space." This panel featured two senior congressional staffers speaking off the record, one from the office of Representative Dana Rohrabacher, and the other from the office of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Rohrabacher is well known as one of the strongest friends of commercial space, but the staffer for
Hutchison also seemed quite strong for commercial space. Since the statements were all off the record, I won't repeat any of them here, but the discussion was interesting and politically mature.
Returning to the featured programming, I took in the Space Launch System (SLS) panel at 4PM. Staffed by high-level NASA engineers from Huntsville, Alabama, the panel gave a good overview of the SLS program. The new SLS does seem an improvement over the canceled Constellation, although it lacks any particular mission and is gobbling up a significant part of the NASA budget. The SLS, sometimes mockingly called the "Senate Launch System" by its detractors because the Senate was so active in specifying the details of its design, would certainly be an asset to the US space program. However, funding SLS heavily at the expense of Commercial Crew to ISS is surely a grave error.
Next, the 5PM panel discussed the so-called "Liberty"--ATK's entry in the Commercial Crew booster competition against the SpaceX Falcon 9, the ULA Atlas 5, and the Blue Origin New Shepard (see <http://www.blueorigin.com/> for more info on Jeff Bezos' entry in the new space race). The Liberty is a reincarnation of the Ares I from the cancelled Constellation program with a few new wrinkles. Among the new wrinkles are an all-composite capsule with a mushroom-hat puller escape rocket system and a second stage from the Ariane 5 first stage. The Liberty first stage is exactly the same as the Ares I first stage--a five-section solid rocket booster (SRB) from ATK.
The Liberty team has a reasonably strong case that the Liberty will have a safe launch process, but a much weaker case that the Liberty can be operated economically, especially compared to Falcon 9. The Falcon 9 is stacked horizontally, moved to the pad on a truck or train, and then erected on the pad as is the Russian practice. This allows the vehicle to be assembled in a normal- sized building and to be easily reached anywhere by people with long ladders as opposed to a gantry. In contrast, the Liberty is stacked in the super-large vehicle assembly building and moved to the pad on the mammoth crawler like the Shuttle, which is a fundamentally more expensive process. Also, the Liberty is about 50% made outside the US, while the Falcon 9 is 100% made in the USA. Still, competition is good, and the Liberty team deserves credit for competing.
The main Friday evening event was the 25th Anniversary NSS Governors' Dinner. It was held at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, with a reception in the America by Air Gallery, an awards program in the Milestones of Flight Gallery, and a dinner in the Space Hall. Hosted by Hugh Downs, the ceremony included Senator John Glenn and Commander Scott Carpenter receiving the NSS Space Pioneer Award for Historic Space Achievement, and a keynote address by Mark Sirangleo, Chairman of Sierra Nevada Space Systems. In addition, we viewed a video of Dr. Stephen Hawking receiving the Robert A. Heinlein Memorial Award from NSS's Paul Damphousse.
This was an amazing event, perhaps the best one yet put on by the NSS. The Milestones of Flight Gallery was a fantastic backdrop to the awards, with the recently added Space Ship One hanging right in front of us, the Bell X-1 to our right, and the X-15 just behind us, not to mention the Liberty 7 and the Apollo 11 Command Module. Paul Damphousse, the new NSS Executive Director, deserves enormous credit for the staging of this event.
Saturday I started bright and early at 9AM with Doug McCuiston, the NASA Director of Mars exploration. This was an excellent and highly professional survey of NASA's efforts to explore Mars, and a nice summary of some of the latest and most exciting results. Very recent photographic evidence suggests for the first time the actions of actual liquid water on the Martian surface in the form of "seeps" that melt on hot days to leak out some water and then freeze up. The big event everyone is looking forward to is the landing of the Curiosity Rover on Mars this coming August. If the landing is successful--the very first usage of a rocket crane as a lander--the largest rover ever, and the first with a nuclear power pack, promises a long and eventful journey of exploration.
The next panel, "International Space Sustainability," proved to be one of the less interesting panels of the conference, and I left early. Fortunately, the lunch speaker, Michael Lopez-Alegria, the President of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, proved to be a pleasant surprise. I expected a possibly dry talk by a leader of the commercial spaceflight movement. Instead, I got a fascinating exposition on Russian cosmonaut training and equipment by one of America's most experienced astronauts. A veteran of three Space Shuttle missions and one ISS mission, Lopez-Alegria has performed 10 EVAs (space walks) in his career, making him the most experienced American spacewalker. He is also in second place in the longest-EVA race and has the longest spaceflight duration of any American at 215 days. His presentation was the best I have yet seen on how the Russians train and fly. A special treat was that Ben Bova received the 2012 Space Pioneer Award. Ben Bova is a well-known SF author and the former NSI President during the L5/NSI merger that produced the current NSS.
After lunch I visited the Space Solar Power (SSP) track for an hour, the first talk of which promoted an effort to create a straw baseline solar power satellite design using the latest technology. Jumping over to the Mars track, I listened to Joe Cassady of Aerojet present one of his company's Mars mission plans. The most interesting thing is that I ended up in the front row sitting next to Buzz Aldrin (yes, the second man to walk on the Moon!). For some reason, Buzz decided I was THE guy to whisper questions about things he didn't understand in the presentation. This put me in
the odd spot of being flattered but having not the slightest idea what to say. I tried to resolve things by asking the speaker what he meant by a "dead-head" orbit, one of Buzz's questions. It turns out this refers to returning from Mars with an empty cargo hold.
Following this, I escaped back to the commercial track and picked up the "Space Markets" talk at 4PM. This panel proved to be an interesting one, with a diverse mix of viewpoints, including a European one that sought to explain the relatively lesser European interest in commercial space. I finished the day at the commercial track panel on X-prizes, and thought that Larry Cooper of NASA especially gave a great presentation on how NASA is making use of prizes to spur innovation. This may seem hard to believe, but the NASA prize rules seem less onerous than the notorious
Google X-prize lunar landing rules.
The day concluded with dinner speaker Jeff Greason, CEO & Founder of XCOR Aerospace. Jeff gave a follow-up to his lecture at the last ISDC advocating the creation of a network of fuel depots in space. You can catch the video at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CasuSZ73OL4> on YouTube. I thought his speech was actually better than the one last year, and certainly more entertaining.
Sunday I slept late because I planned to attend the NSS Chapters Assembly meeting in the evening after dinner (shameless plug--I am running for the Board--vote for me if you are a member of NSS!!). At 11 am I rolled into the NSS Heritage panel, featuring Lori Garver (former NSS Executive Director and now #2 at NASA), Robert Ordway, Ben Bova, and Art Dula. This was a great panel, and it was pleasure to see everyone, including Ben, on the stage.
The Sunday lunch featured long-time space activist Rick Tumlinson, giving one of his patented rambling but inspirational talks, hitting on his latest thoughts. The afternoon consisted of the NSS Board meeting, which I am *not* going to cover in this report, except to say that NSS is lucky to have Paul Damphousse as its new Executive Director. Paul was responsible for getting Buzz Aldrin on the Colbert Report to give Steven Colbert an NSS award. See the video on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/void-colbert-award>. Paul has achieved more positive publicity for NSS in a few months than many NSS Executive Directors achieved in years.
The speaker at the Sunday dinner was Lori Garver--mentioned above. I've said this before--but I'll say it again. If you'd told me back in 1990 that in 2012 NSS Executive Director (ED) Lori Garver was going to be #2 at NASA pushing every day for commercial space, and that her NSS successor, George Whitesides, was going to be the CEO of the leading space tourism company, aptly named "Virgin Galactic," I'd have thought this was nothing more than a fantasy dream of wish-fulfillment. And yet, here we are. In 2012. And Dragon has berthed with ISS, delivered its first load of supplies, and returned safely to Earth.
So I say it again--today is the day--now is the time! To quote Mark Hopkins at the ISDC, "We are winning!"
Today is the end of the beginning, and dawn of the true Age of Space. Ad Astra! [-dls]