Common wisdom says that space science must rely solely on the Federal government for funding. A new white paper from the International Institute of Space Commerce challenges that assumption.

The Institute has released “Innovative Models for Private Financing of Space Science Missions,” which is available as a free download.

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A blogger by the name of M. Moleman, who calls himself “The Armchair Space Expert,” has published a cost analysis of NASA’s Space Launch System.

Moleman defends SLS against charges made by John Strickland, who believes it is unaffordable. Moleman’s conclusion is rather positive:

If we were to take SLS’s preliminary schedule of one cargo flight and one manned flight every other year, we get $1.2 billion for the cargo flight, and $2 billion for the manned one using Orion. A development cost of 12.6 billion dollars will have to be spread out over the total number of flights too, so if we use 30 flights like mister Strickland did we have to add $420 million to every flight. Over 30 flights, the average cost of SLS would be $2.02 billion per flight, though the number of cargo missions would probably end up dominating later on since most current Design Reference Missions would require more cargo then crewed flights. With a ratio of 2:1, we get a total of $1.89 billion per flight. If we take the costs of SLS only, not counting Orion, we get $1.6 billion per flight, which equals $18.000 per kilogram. Would this be expensive? Yes. Are there better alternatives out there? Absolutely. But it is nonetheless a huge improvement over the Space Shuttle, with payloads three to five times as big, much lower cost per kg to orbit, while eventually taking up less of the overall annual budget of NASA.

Unfortunately, his analysis contains a number of errors.

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Dan Dumbacher of NASA and John Strickland of the National Space Society are having an argument over the Space Launch System. Unfortunately, both gentlemen are missing the point when it comes to space transportation.

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The NASA Administrator will remain accountable to elected officials (and, indirectly, the American people), thanks to a bipartisan vote of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

Space News reports that the committee voted 20-19 to accept an amendment offered by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), which removed language making the NASA Administrator a six-year appointed position. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), and Stephen Stockman (R-TX) joining with 17 Democrats to pass the amendment.

A fixed, six-year term would make it impossible for a President to remove a NASA Administrator for policy reasons. The language was introduced by Republican members who were angry over NASA attempts to cancel the Orion capsule and Space Launch System (née Ares V). It was intended to create greater “stability” by making it harder to cancel NASA programs.

A Russian Proton rocket carrying three Glonass navigation satellites failed quite dramatically on Monday:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7piHsxLs7Ss&w=700]

The Russian space program has had quite a few failures recently. Nevertheless, the United States Congress seems more inclined to trust NASA’s astronauts to Roscosmos than to US companies like SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, and Boeing which have no experience in human spaceflight (unless you count the Space Shuttle, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the X-15, and US portions of the International Space Station — all of which were built by Boeing or heritage companies acquired by Boeing).

Congress has used safety concerns as an excuse to slow-march the Dragon, DreamChaser, and CST-100 programs. The Russian space program, however, is exempt from the requirements being imposed on US companies. The reasoning behind this double standard dis inexplicable.

The US military is scrapping $7 billion of equipment in Iraq because the cost of bringing it home exceeds the equipment’s value.

This should be a lesson for space development. A resource is not a resource unless you can afford to extract it and move it where it needs to go.

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Jim Hillhouse, the founder and editor of the Americaspace blog wrote:

We have a gov’t owned rocket rather than a commercial rocket for the same reason we don’t have United Airlines or FedEx as a replacement for the Air Mobility Command. It’s bad policy to hinge a national goal, in this case beyond Earth exploration, on the whims of commercial companies whose loyalties are to its shareholders, not the American people. You say that’s a problem. I disagree.

As it turns out, Mr. Hillhouse is ill-informed. The great bulk of US military logistics (over 80%) is performed by commercial carriers. The military even maintains a Civil Reserve Air Fleet program under which it can commandeer commercial aircraft in case of a national emergency. There are over 1300 airplanes in the CRAF.

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Lt. Col. Dan Ward (USAF) has written an article on Lessons Defense Could Learn From NASA (specifically, the Faster, Better, Cheaper missions of he Goldin era).

NASA could also learn some lessons from itself.

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In his pamphlet The Law, French political theorist Claude Frédéric Bastiat wrote:

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

Those words, written in 1850, could easily describe the space-policy debates of today.

When NASA says it isn’t going to build a mining settlement on the Moon, members of Congress (and the media) conclude that NASA is against anyone going to the Moon.

When NASA tried to cancel the Ares V Space Launch System, they said NASA was against any space-launch capability.

If anything is to be done in space, they think it must be done by government.

Jeff Foust just tweeted this from the International Space Development Conference in San Diego:

Aldrin on capsule splashdowns: just because Elon loves salt water doesn’t mean thats’s the way spacecraft should return from space.

That is a bit unfair, since Elon Musk is developing technology to land future versions of his Dragon capsule on land — perhaps because of his experience with salt water. We suspect that Aldrin was twitting Musk and trying to draw a rise out of the audience.

Yet, he does have a point, as the United States government continues to spend billions of dollars to develop the Orion capsule, duplicating capabilities NASA had in the 1960’s. Meanwhile, the Dream Chaser spaceplane, based on 30 years of NASA and Soviet research, is in danger of cancelation even as it continues to advance toward flight test. It’s as if the Congress is determined to freeze the development of human spaceflight capabilities at 1960’s levels.

Every member of Congress who has a NASA center in his district seems to think that makes him an expert on space technology. Fortunately, their opinions may not be relevant much longer. The sooner we take human spaceflight out of the hands of politicians, the better.

Some things have not changed since the end of the Cold War. Russia is still making the mistake of believing its own propaganda.

A new article by Alexei Lyakhov and Artyom Kobzev proclaims, “Russia Has No Rivals in Space Tourism.” The article was published by the Voice of Russia, the international radio service of the All Russia State Radio and Television company.

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NASA Administrator Major General Charles Bolden says he will have to make cuts to NASA’s “Commercial Resupply Services” contract, Aviation Week reports.

NASA has awarded CRS contracts to Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Orbital Sciences Corporation for 12 and 8 cargo missions, valuaed at $1.6 billion and $1.9 billion, respectively.

On April 25, General Bolden told the Senate Appropriations Committee, “I’ll have to renegotiate those contracts. We won’t fly the number of missions that we have. Right now we’re flying 20 commercial cargo missions to the International Space Station over the next five years for three-point-some-odd billion dollars, an incredible value to the nation. I can’t carry that out under sequester.”

It’s hard to see how the proposed renegotiation would save money, however. The International Space Station needs a certain number of cargo flights to operate. There are some optional science experiments, but science aboard ISS is already severely restricted and it’s hard to see how it could be cut much further.

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NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Development (CCDev) program keeps getting smaller all the time.

Last June, Congress forced a “compromise” on NASA, which was more like a surrender. Under this “compromise,” NASA was forced to reduce the number of companies in the CCDev competition from five to three. The third company (Sierra Nevada) received a much smaller amount of funding than the primary competitors (SpaceX and Boeing), so the current field is often referred to as “two-and-a-half competitors.”

Now, it appears the field is about to shrink further. At a hearing on March 20, NASA Administrator Maj. Gen. Charles Bolden told Congress, “We intend to put a request for proposal on the street this summer and you will probably get a downselect.” The losers will be kept hanging for a while, however. “You won’t see the selection announced until the middle of next year, 2014,” Bolden said.

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