Elon Musk, founder of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) of California, made an announcement at the National Press Club yesterday that is (figuratively now, literally in the future) earth shaking.
One of the (minor, given its relative importance) issues before the Congress on the next CR is what to do about the NASA budget. The agency is currently forced to waste a million-and-a-half dollars a day on a program that has been canceled, due to language from 2010 added by Alabama Senator Richard Shelby that enjoins them from shutting down the former Constellation program. In order to stop this, the CR must contain an anomaly rescinding this (something that Congress has failed to add in the past few CRs). In addition, there is a dispute between the House and the Senate on whether or not NASA should be forced to move forward on the space pork otherwise known as the Senate Space Launch System.
The former wants to give NASA the flexibility to decide what kind of systems it needs to carry out its future plans for getting humans beyond earth orbit, while the latter wants to make sure it’s partially built in Utah. The claims in favor of this are that the solid rocket boosters (currently used on the Shuttle, about to be retired) manufactured there are essential to build the heavy-lift vehicle that Congress demands, which in turn is essential for exploration and development beyond earth orbit. Both of these claims are dubious, but there are is at least a rational technical debate about the latter one. What is hard to dispute is that the Space Launch System will be horrifically costly to the taxpayers at a time of extreme fiscal constraints, and that Congress hasn’t even authorized, let alone appropriated sufficient funding with which to build it.
Enter Elon.
Yesterday he rolled out a new launch concept, based on the successful Falcon 9 (which flawlessly delivered a pressurized capsule to orbit in December, which returned safely to earth — a first for a private company. It uses similar cores to the Falcon 9, with an upgraded engine, and it will deliver fifty metric tons (about half the capacity of a Saturn V) for a price of about a hundred million dollars. SpaceX is spending their own money to develop it, and he expects a first flight out of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California late next year, with flights out of Florida a year or so later. He is proposing something that has been the holy grail of space launch for many years — a thousand dollars a pound to orbit (a factor of ten below current prices). The vehicle will be twice the capacity of the United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV and Atlas V, at a fraction of the cost. He currently has no contracts with the Air Force, but once he starts flying, it will be hard for them to resist. This kind of price point will revolutionize the industry, and it will be hard to beat until we have a lot more traffic on the fully reusable systems of the future.
But the most important thing about this vehicle for the taxpayer (and the space enthusiast) is that it shows how absurd the Congress’s demands on NASA are. There will be rear-guard actions by lobbyists from ATK, the manufacturer of the solid motors, but continuing events like this will make it difficult, if not impossible, to continue to fund the existing space-industrial complex, the iron triangle of NASA, Congress and its cost-plus contractors. The unaffordable era of Apollo will finally be over, and a new era of cost-effective spaceflight is beginning.
Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer and a consultant in space commercialization, space tourism and Internet security and he is the chairman of the Competitive Space Task Force (http://www.competitivespace.org). He offers occasionally biting commentary about infinity and beyond at his weblog, Transterrestrial Musings. He is an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
