Day Trips to Space Were Right Around the Corner…in 1998
Kistler, Pioneer Rocketplane, Kelly Space, Venture Star, Rotary Rocket, Burt Rutan & the X Prize. Man the future's going to awesome! pic.twitter.com/LXok7CgTgJ
— Parabolicarc.com (@spacecom) August 31, 2017
Popular Science from February 1998.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the future just ain’t what it used to be.
13 responses to “Day Trips to Space Were Right Around the Corner…in 1998”
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But Doug, we’re already living in a lot of what folks were asking for years ago. We’re launching to orbit about every two weeks. We have regular comings and goings to a space station and have been doing it for 20 years. We have regular almost on demand access to LEO, and GEO. Access to LEO is now well below $10,000 per lb. There is real progress in access to space. And I might add, we Americans have finally gotten out of the habit of investing in flash in the pan ideas. We have new, real infrastructure, and it shows in our dominance of space flight both in rate and contracts. We’re not doing great, but we’re doing quite well. Not on all fronts but enough. It takes time to turn science fiction into history.
3 different companies are about to be doing HSF. 2 companies are doing launchers for these.
IFF we get private space stations going, we are very likely to never lose LEO access again.
Now, we also need to push for the moon/Mars. If we go to the moon 2020-2021, then again I doubt that we will lose our ability to go to planets in the solar system. The reason is that multiple companies will be doing larger and larger launchers to make things cheap. At some point, I expect us to do an elevator or more likely, a rocket with mag launch combined with ground sourced electrical engines. Those will be cheap to run, but expensive to develop.
Yes, just as it took NASA getting out of the commercial launch market after Challenger to create an American commercial launch industry it will take the end of the ISS to create a commercial space station industry.
This is nothing new. The Founding Fathers recognized it when they banned the Post Office from owning and running its own mail stage couches like the English post office ran. This led to the emergence and expansion of the private stage couch industry. It set the foundation for the emergence of commercial river boats, railroads and early airlines, all stimulated by the post office paying for private firms to carry mail instead of doing it itself.
You either learn from economic history, or you just keep repeating the mistakes and harming the economy.
as the past still tugs at us with SLS and Orion 🙂 and some other great NASA project that we have no clue of
I like the LH2 that SLS will carry–perfect for NTR.
And one of the companies who is providing cheaper launches is also recovering and reusing first stages as well as recovering and reusing ISS cargo vehicles. So, the reusable launch vehicles envisioned in this article are finally starting to materialize, even though they’re not yet fully reusable (i.e. no second stage recovery and reuse yet).
have to wonder how soon SX will go after that second stage reuse.
Hopefully, it is after FH and Dragon V2.
It will be nice to see, however, I would think that 2nd stage really is not that expensive. Smaller tanks; single engine vs 9 or 27.
As such, it would have to less than 25%, if not much closer to 10-15%, of the total expendable rocket costs.
I don’t think you can really trust all the assumptions made in the recent Wired article on the costs of the Formosat-5 launch, but it assumed a 40% profit on the standard $62m price tag, leaving the actual launch cost of $37m, $26m (or 70%) of which being the cost of the booster. This leaves only $11m for the upper stage and fairing, and Musk said that the fairing was worth $5m – $6m, all implying that the upper stage was worth about the same as the fairing.
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I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the future just ain’t what it used to be.
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Good line.
But, I think that we are quite close to getting that around-the-corner-future-since-1969.
it is almost a religious cult
voodoo cult?
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
So what was going on in 1998 that got everyone excited?
“Commercial Space Act of 1998, Title II – P.L. 105-303
An Act
To encourage the development of a commercial space industry in the United States, and for other purposes. Oct. 28, 1998 – [H.R. 1702]
TITLE I–PROMOTION OF COMMERCIAL SPACE OPPORTUNITIES
Sec. 101. Commercialization of Space Station.
Sec. 102. Commercial space launch amendments.
Sec. 103. Launch voucher demonstration program.
Sec. 104. Promotion of United States Global Positioning System standards.
Sec. 105. Acquisition of space science data.
Sec. 106. Administration of Commercial Space Centers.
Sec. 107. Sources of Earth science data.
TITLE II–FEDERAL ACQUISITION OF SPACE TRANSPORTATION SERVICES
Sec. 201. Requirement to procure commercial space transportation services.
Sec. 202. Acquisition of commercial space transportation services.
Sec. 203. Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 amendments.
Sec. 204. Shuttle privatization.
Sec. 205. Use of excess intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Sec. 206. National launch capability study.”
https://www.nasa.gov/office…
People thought Congress was actually going to let it happen. NOPE
It took a second space shuttle accident that afforded President Bush the opportunity to actually add this into a new space agenda. The Vision for Space Exploration. Although all of it could not be pushed through .. Congress did fund commercial cargo in exchange for the pork rockets to nowhere the Ares I and Ares V. Of course we know congress voted to cancel funding those and allowed commercial crew to start but they still got a last gasp, the SLS another boondoggle that will eventually go the way of the dinosaur
Again, your arrow is going backwards. The act was passed BECAUSE of the efforts of private ventures to develop RLVs. It did NOT stimulate those efforts it was driven by them.
What actually happen was that it was realized by the firms working on RLVs that the federal government had neglected to give the FAA AST authority to approve commercial rockets returning from space, so they fixed it with the Commercial Space Act of 1998.
As with all government acts a bunch of other ideas was attached to it. Most of the ones you listed were failures or had only a marginal impact. The NASA science community never really accepted the idea of buying data about the Moon, Mars or Celestial Bodies from private firms. The commercialization of the space station failed under it. COTS/CCP and CASIS have a different pedigree.
The launch voucher program predated it by years.
https://www.nasa.gov/office…
It was a last attempt to make it work. It never really did.
I will say it again, European style top down economic policy simply does not work in the U.S. The economy here is different, very different, then the micro-managed economies of Europe. It’s why the U.S. economy is so successful at innovation.