Finding the right balance between government and commercial space interests in the development, regulation, and marketing of a new generation of launch vehicles that promise radically cheaper access to space is critical, officials from industry and government said at a Washington symposium in July.
     The Cheap Access to Space Symposium, sponsored by the Space Frontier Foundation with funding from NASA, met a few blocks from Capitol Hill July 21-22 to discuss the roles of industry, including both the established major companies and the new start-ups, and various government agencies in improving space access.
     The sessions focused on key areas that needed to be addressed for new commercial launch activities to succeed. These areas included free and competitive markets, regulatory issues, and the eventual transition from the shuttle to future launch systems. Notably absent were extended discussions and debates on technology -- evidence that the technical concerns with developing reusable one- or two-stage vehicles are less important that concerns about operating them legally and successfully.

Free and Competitive Markets
A key area of concern of conference attendees, including a panel of industry leaders and government officials, was how to make the commercial marketplace for launch vehicles free and competitive while determining the role, if any, the government should play in the marketplace.
     Most saw a role for government in research and development of new launch technologies. "It's hard to be against R&D," said Rick Fleeter, president of AeroAstro. However, he thought the government had not done a good job stimulating commercial enterprises to develop new vehicles, and thought an incentive like the X-Prize was a much better stimulus.
     Panels were divided, though, on whether government should protect domestic launch companies though the use of quotas on international launchers, such as Russia's Proton. Fleeter thought the way to get launch costs was to eliminate quotas, to get "a lot of people doing a lot of stuff as cheaply as possible."
     Mark Bitterman, vice president for government relations at Orbital Science Corporation, offered a somewhat different view. He said his company was against "protectionism", but thought a level playing field was necessary for American companies to compete. He called on the government to be "a little tougher" with non-market economies.
     There was also a discussion on just how elastic the market was to expected decreases in launch costs. Pete Conrad, former astronaut and current chairman of Universal Space Lines, said in a separate talk, "The market is certainly there," adding that he expected a "fantastically larger market when we start getting cheaper access to space."
     That position was questioned by William Claybaugh, business advisor for NASA's Reusable Launch Vehicle program. He questioned the elasticity of the market, noting that the demand for low-cost "Get-Away Special" payloads on the shuttle, available for only thousands of dollars, was far less than planned.
     Claybaugh says the current market is "clearly" not free and competitive, and called the current situation of high launch costs and low demand a good example of a "failed market." He believed that launch costs have to go down to $600/pound or less before there will be a great growth in demand.

Improving the Regulatory Environment
An issue that looms larger than technical issues, and perhaps even more than the marketplace for new launch vehicles, is the regulatory environment. Technology for commercial launch vehicle is moving faster than the Federal Aviation Administration's ability to provide regulations for it, although both industry and government officials believed that the FAA was doing its best to work with the industry to draft new regulations.
     Patti Grace Smith, an associate administrator at the FAA's Commercial Space Transportation office, said that the development of RLVs posed "the most challenges" to the FAA. Smith said the FAA currently has the power to license launch vehicle, but has no authority over landings; making it impossible for the agency to regulate and approve for use commercial RLVs.
     Smith said legislation that has already passed the House of Representatives, with a similar version currently being drafted in the Senate, with give the FAA the authority it needs to handle reentry and reuse issues.
     Manuel Vega, chief of regulations of the FAA's Commercial Space Transportation office, said 16 pages of regulations currently exist for commercial space launch vehicles, with new regulations under development. Two new regulations, which call for updated licensing rules and financial responsibility by launch companies, are currently open for comments, while two more which would cover private and state-owned launch sites are under development.
     Vega listed several criteria which he considered essential to a favorable regulatory environment. Such an environment, Vega though, protects the public, is cost effective, enables technology development, complements market forces, involves industry and the public, and more.
     Members of the launch industry on the regulatory panel agreed that the FAA was doing a good job to date, but had concerns. Gary Hudson, president of Rotary Rocket Company, said he thought the agency was doing a fine job, but was concerned about the future since "regulation can be used as a barrier to entry."
     Still, there was concern that an unfavorable regulatory environment might push launch companies to offshore launch sites. Kistler, for example, is considering launch sites in Nevada and Woomera, Australia for its reusable launch vehicle. One Kistler official said the company had "a fiduciary duty to its investors to act to protect their investments and maximize return."
     Other companies thought that moving their launch operations outside the U.S. to escape the regulatory environment would be unnecessary. Hudson said that the country would suffer "a big hit in prestige" if companies were forces offshore, which would likely ensure changes to regulations.

Making the Transition from Shuttle
One of the liveliest debates of the symposium was the question of when and how NASA would make the transition from the current fleet of space shuttles to a new fleet of reusable launch vehicles, likely operated by a private company.
      Stephen Oswald, NASA's deputy associate administrator for the space shuttle, said shuttle flights would continue to 2012, the end of the planned operational life of the International Space Station. Until then the shuttle would undergo a number of performance and safety upgrades, including perhaps the introduction of liquid flyback boosters next decade, study contracts for which were released earlier this year.
     Robert Crippen, former astronaut and KSC director and current president of the Thiokol Propulsion Group, suggested private funding may be used for shuttle upgrades, perhaps by United Space Alliance, which takes over all funding for shuttle operations later this year.
     Not all members of the panel were happy with continuing shuttle operations well into the next century. Rick Tumlinson, president of the Space Frontier Foundation, said the current fleet of shuttles was getting old and called on NASA to make a "real commitment" to making a transition from the shuttle to one or more vehicles.
     However, Alan Ladwig, NASA's associate administrator for policy and plans, called any thoughts that the shuttle would end soon "pathetic."

The Role of X-Vehicles
The purpose of X-vehicles -- government-funded programs to develop advanced launch technologies -- also came under the scrutiny of symposium attendees, but found wide support in its current role among industry and government officials.
     NASA's Stephen Cook described the two tiers of NASA's efforts to develop new launch technologies. "Trailblazer" programs will be fully integrated flight demonstrators, while "Pathfinder" programs will have a narrow focus, demonstrating just "1 or 2 big items" for less than $100 million and in under two years.
     The Air Force is also interested in testing new technologies for a military spaceplane, which according to Jess Sponable is "synergistic" with commercial launch vehicle development. He said the Air Force needs to "blacken the skies with X-vehicles" to improve space access, just as it did in the 1940s through the early 1960s to improve aircraft.
     Current X-vehicle development is going "pretty well" so far said Henry Vanderbilt, executive director of the Space Access Society. He urged the government to keep the distinction between X-vehicle and flight prototypes very separate, to prevent problems that have happened in the past as X-vehicle got less experimental.
     However, Air Force Col. Pete Worden thought that operations was as big an issue as the technology, and urged that X-vehicles be able "to do something", to test their operational capabilities.
     All agreed, though, that now all X-vehicles will work, and the government and the public need to be aware that failures are an important part of the process. "What doesn't work is valuable," Vanderbilt said.
     David Swain, general manager of McDonnell Douglas's "Phantom Works", summed it up by saying, "X-vehicles are about learning."

The Caravel was a round ship of moderate size but not too round. Moreover, she had a less clumsy appearance. The Portuguese in their long voyages of discovery, Columbus on his famous westward passage to the West Indies, used Caravels. They were, according to M. August Jal, the great authority on ancient naval architecture, "More graceful in shape than their contemporaries, the nefs, and having narrower quarters." Also, they were faster sailors, more able and were better fitted for all enterprises demanding speed and rapid maneuvering.
      From "Frobisher, the life story of a great sea adventurer,"
      by William McFee Harper & Brothers, New York 1928

The extraordinary age, late 15th early 16th centuries, when European civilization discovered both the New World and new routes to the Asian world, was preceded by a nearly century long process of what we would now call R&D. This effort was largely the work of one poor, isolated kingdom on the periphery of the Euro-Atlantic world. It was the Portuguese who did the intellectual and technological heavy lifting which laid the groundwork for the voyages of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan and the others. This sudden outpouring of creativity, greed, idealism and curiosity resulted in the five hundred year age of European world empires.
     In shipbuilding in particular, the Portuguese succeeded where others had failed. They designed and built a type of relatively small, easily handled, shallow draft, solid sailing ship which did the great bulk of the early reconnaissance, but also performed brilliantly on some of the most famous trips of that period. These were the caravels.
     It is worth remembering that the two ships which survived Columbus' first crossing were the smaller Nina and Pinta, both caravels. The larger Santa Maria struck a reef and was broken up.
     Long before Columbus, the Portuguese were sending their caravels down the West Coast of Africa, drawing charts and building up their knowledge of the winds and currents in that part of the world. In this process they discovered and rediscovered Madeira, the Canary and the Cape Verde Islands.
     Eventually they had gathered enough knowledge to make the decisive voyage around the Cape of Good Hope around the tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean where they found a thriving trade system dominated by their Muslim enemies. They soon challenged and rapidly came to dominate the sea lanes of Asia.
     Today, America faces a roughly similar choice. What we do have is a program we can use to develop our own 21st-Century version of the Portuguese caravel building shipyard - the International Space Station.

Caravels and the Growth of European Civilization
It was in the 1430's, almost 70 years before Da Gama entered the Indian Ocean, that the last of the great Ming Dynasty fleets sailed from China to the southeast coast of Africa. Commanded by a Muslim eunuch named Zheng He, the fleets of oceangoing junks sailed unchallenged and unchallengable on seven great expeditions which for a few short years established a loose Chinese maritime hegemony from Singapore to Mogadishu. Then due perhaps to a combination of corruption, border wars, piracy and intellectual arrogance on the part of the neo-Confucian scholars who came to dominate Imperial policy, everything they'd achieved was thrown away. As Bruce Swanson put it in his authoritative "Eighth Voyage of the Dragon," "The timing of Chinese maritime decline could not have been worse, for it coincided with European maritime expansion into Asia. The Portuguese arrived in 1516 and although expelled in 1521, their exodus was short lived..."
     What happened was that both Chinese and Muslim civilizations lost control of their own destinies and had to endure 500 years of European domination. They have still not fully recovered from the experience. The brilliant novelist V. S. Naipaul referred to India as a "Wounded Civilization." The same could be said of the Chinese and Islamic Empires who lost sea control to the upstart Portuguese, Dutch and British.
     The origins of the caravels and their larger cousins, the galleons and carracks, are to be found in the extraordinary geographic advantage the shipwrights of the southwest Iberian Peninsula had over their North European and Mediterranean rivals.
     In the European world of the High Middle Ages (12th to 15th Centuries), if a Venetian or Genoese ship, a great galley or large cog, was in any way badly designed or weakly built its first exposure to the fury of the Atlantic would either sink her or more likely send her running for the nearest port where she would be either repaired or if damaged beyond repair would be beached and left to be picked over and examined by local shipbuilders and shipowners. Like 20th Century technical intelligence officers analyzing a crashed enemy aircraft, the Spanish and Portuguese could then incorporate the lessons learned into their own designs.
     In his "Europe Emerges--Transition toward an industrial world society, 600-1750," Robert L. Reynolds relates a story about the medieval origins of Iberian shipbuilding.

...About the year 1000...when a raid by Mohammedans near the great Christian shrine of Santiago (St. James) of Compostella had terrified the local people, a Genoese pilgrim asked, "Why do you tolerate this? Why don't you chase them away?" They answered, "We don't know how to make the proper ships or use them." He said, "I'll show you how." So they worked hard for some time at building ships and learning how to handle them. They them chased the Mohammedans along the coast, having taken them by surprise."

The Northern European ships would be built with the harsh local seas in mind but on their own trips to the Mediterranean they would have to sail across the Bay of Biscay and then south along the coasts of northern Spain and Portugal. The first of the Tagus the Portuguese shipbuilders were ready to learn of any mistakes or any new design ideas the northerners had come up with.
     The Iberian ability to take advantage of this hard won empirical knowledge, carefully kept within the guild, allowed them to integrate the various technologies into the most technologically advanced structure of their age--the intercontinental galleon.

Building the Foundations for a New Caravel
The question we face today is: How do we use the technology we have to build the interplanetary ships that will take Mankind from being a single planet species to the status of a multiplanet species? There are many reasons including the need for a broader basis on which to build a sustainable future. Earth is just not enough. We need to capture the energy resources as well as the minerals that exist just beyond our grasp inside our solar system. No matter how good our environmental cleanup and control technology becomes, industrial pollution will be a fact of life on earth until the industries that create it are moved of the planet
     In his book, "The Case For Mars," Bob Zubrin refers to the international approach to a Mars mission as the Sagan Model, named after the well-known astronomer who has advocated a joint U.S.- Russian mission as a way of promoting peace and stability. What this kind of approach may also provide is a chance to learn from each other's mistakes. If done in the context of a Mars mission this could provide a certain amount of cross-fertilization without the kind of embarrassment involved in economic espionage or in public post-failure analysis such as the Rogers report on the Challenger accident.
     In the space station we already have a project which is teaching us where our strengths and weaknesses are. The initial failure of the pressure tests on the first station elements built by Boeing at Huntsville exemplify the kind of learning process needed to get an accurate grip on exactly what we know how to do and what we've got to learn how to do. To build a first generation of successful interplanetary ships such as Zubrin suggests we've got to know exactly what our technological limits are and where we've got to make an effort to overcome them.
     The problems on Mir have already taught us about the strengths and weaknesses of Russian technology. Indeed, the June 25th accident, when the Progress supply vehicle struck the Spektr module and damaged one of its solar arrays as well as depressurizing the module itself, has given us a whole series of lessons to be learned. What the problems of Mir have given us is a basis on which to think about the kind of design solutions that all inhabited space systems will need in the next fifty years or so. More than one generation of space explorers will be grateful to the Russians for these lessons.
     The very long and politically very difficult space station development process, the so-called "perils of Pauline," has shown the real weakness in the traditional NASA approach to large scale projects. The problems are all too well known-too many bureaucrats, too many "rice bowls," equals not enough results. The longer a project stays on the drawing board the easier it is to target for elimination. In this age of almost balanced budgets, projects that do not show results are easy to zero out.
     The case for greater investment in our space program is strong, but even a modest increase to say, 15 or 16 billion dollars in fiscal year 1999 is going to be difficult. The need for American technological supremacy is accepted by most Americans but for years they didn't see NASA as helping us get there. The computer revolution which NASA helped midwife didn't fire the imagination. It was easy to put down the agency with jokes about the billions we spent to go to the moon so Americans could drink Tang.
     What we do need is a new goal. Mars makes the most sense for many reasons the best of which is, in John F. Kennedy's words, "because it is hard." Americans know that nothing worthwhile is ever easy. A program of exploration and colonization on Mars would be hard, it would cost lives as well as treasure, but in the end humanity would have a second home and in the process our first home, Earth, could be made cleaner, richer and more secure.
     Most important it is in America that we have to renew our ability to work together, to expect great things of ourselves and our neighbors. Diversity and tolerance are only sources of strength if we balance them with high standards and great dreams; otherwise they become excuses for sloth and ignorance. Just as America has led the world to a "new birth of freedom" we can lead humanity to a new frontier in the sky. In this we can unify around what is best in ourselves. What is needed is leadership.
     To begin building this new civilization we must first build the ships that will carry us out there.