Ceilidh

Michael Zey
futurist3000@aol.com

When President George W. Bush (news - web sites) speaks here Jan. 14, he is expected to lay out a long term plan for returning astronauts to the moon and forging on from there to Mars. The undertaking will almost certainly entail the doling out large government contracts to NASA (news - web sites)'s roster of aerospace contractors.

But a sustained human presence on the moon, advocates say, is best achieved by harnessing the full creativity of the commercial sector.

"It is my hope that this new vision does have an ample opportunity for the commercial sector," said Courtney Stadd, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe's former chief of staff who left the space agency for private industry in late 2003. "If it is limited to just a few astronauts exploring the moon and Mars, as we learned after Apollo 17, it will not grab and sustain public attention."

David Gump, president of Fairfax, Va.-based LunaCorp and author of the 1990 book, "Space Enterprise: Beyond NASA," agreed.
"It's up to the administration on which path it takes into the forest," Gump said. "If it welcomes private participation, life is good."

LunaCorp has been working with its primary corporate sponsor, RadioShack, for several years trying to close the business case on a privately-funded robotic mission to the moon that would blend science and entertainment. A major impediment to such a mission becoming reality, Gump said, is launch costs.

So far, the Bush plan does not appear to include development of new gneration of less expensive launch vehicles, but would rely instead on the recently introduced stable evolved expendable launch vehicles built by Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

That's a disappointment to Gump, who argues that for the $100 million cost of awarding a commercial launch contract to Boeing or Lockheed Martin, NASA could entice more innovative players into the market. He sited as an example El Segundo, Calif.-based Space Exploration Technologies, which is finishing development on a small reusable rocket priced at $6 million a launch. The company recently announced plans to scale up the rocket to compete with the Delta 2, the workhorse of NASA's space science enterprise.

But even if NASA continues to tread the same conservative path to orbit it has taken for years, Gump said there is still plenty of room for innovative practices.

"You can throw up a dozen Delta 2 payloads to space station, assemble them there and send a Battlestar Galactica-sized payload to the moon," Gump said. "We have to make creative use of our existing infrastructure."

One major proponent of on-orbit assembly is long time space entreprenuer Dennis Wingo. As president of Huntsville, Ala.-based SkyCorp, Wingo got as far as anybody in recent years in forging a commercial agreement with NASA.

The agreement entailed having astronauts on board the space station assemble a small snap-together satellite designed by SkyCorp and "launch" it out an airlock. The demonstration fell through, however, when SkyCorp withdrew from the agreement citing financing setbacks that jeopardized the project's schedule.

Wingo said the same approach to spacecraft assembly, paired with a lower-cost launcher like the Falcon rocket SpaceX has in development, could dramatically increase the rate of lunar launches and do so at a cost that is palatable to U.S. taxpayers.

"If we are going to do this in a less expensive manner, then using the space station as an on orbit assembly platform is a logical way to go," Wingo said.

Wingo said private sector-government synergy stands the best chance of laying the lunar infrastructure needed for a sustained human presence there.

"If we are going to the moon in a sustainable way, we're not talking about needing just one or two satellites," Wingo said. "We need a radar satellite, a high resolution mapper, a lunar version of GPS and a lot more."

To Wingo's way of thinking, NASA's customary way of doing business is not up to the tasks Bush is about to assign the agency.
"If this is going to be the old NASA contractor model, it coing to fail because there is no way that's going to produce the cost effective solutions this venture needs," he said