Name Change (for Spaceflight postings)

Well, due to an apparent complete lack of interest (no comments whatsoever), I've moved the postings concerning the future of American manned spaceflight to another blog, fortiteraadaspera.blogspot.com. Fortitera Ad Aspera translates (as far as I can figure) into Bravely To The Stars. I had tried the more common Ad Astra, Ad Astra Per Aspera, and Per Aspera Ad Astra (respectively, To The Stars, To The Stars Despite Difficulties, and Despite Difficulties, To The Stars) but apparently others have used these names for now-defunct blogs on blogspot. Anyway, I am hoping that the name change may generate more interest in this particular subject that's very important to me, and to the future of the United States.

I will try to use this blog to return to what is probably more appropriate for the Eufaula College of Loafers--just miscellaneous stuff, recollections, and so on.

Commercial Manned Spaceflight: Regulations?

As those who may have checked out my profile, I am an aircraft mechanic, and have been for coming up on 20 years. As with any aircraft mechanic, I am very familiar with the Federal Aviation Regulations, or FARs. These are federal laws, specifically Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

One of the problems in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's space policy document is that it appears to designate NASA as the regulatory agency in charge of spaceflight activities. NASA was never chartered as a regulatory body; the FAA is. In fact, the FAA already has some regulations pertaining to space launch and recovery operations (the Part 400 series FARs in Title 14 of the CFRs). I'm assuming that this is some sort of error or oversight on the Office of Science and Technology Policy's part, and not some sort of Executive Order changing governmental policy.

In any event, the Part 20 series FARs describe, in very great detail, the airworthiness and certification standards for different types of aircraft, engines, propellers, etc. There are literally several thousands of pages of regulations there, and if a person or company wants to develop a new airplane, helicopter, engine, or whatever, and sell it as an FAA-approved airplane, helicopter, engine, or whatever, that whatever-it-is will have to meet every single one of those regulations pertinent to that whatever, and demonstrate that it does; the FAA isn't just going to take your word for it.

Every major component, and nearly all minor components, have some sort of regulation pertaining to what size or shape it must be, how many of them there must be, where they must be located, what they can be made from, what types of indicators and controls must be provided. This has contributed greatly to our air transportation system being one of the safest in the world; you've got to go back quite a ways to find a design-related fatality accident involving a major US air carrier. (Specifically, design standards for transport-category airplanes (i.e., airliners) can be found in Part 25 of the FARs.)

The problem is that there is no equivalent for spacecraft. There are some basic regulations concerning the licensing and operation of launch and recovery facilities, pilot training requirements, and financial liability. Some of this perhaps leaves something to be desired; for example, a private pilot that has an instrument rating (for flying blind, on instruments only), with a 2nd class medical certification, has all that's required to fly a spaceship (other than some training on the spacecraft itself). What this means is that an airplane pilot with as little as 125 hours of flight time could, in theory, be legally qualified to carry passengers into orbit. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to have someone a little more qualified at the controls--someone like US Airway's Captain Sullenberger (the pilot who put his Airbus down in the Hudson River last year--that was a very impressive piece of airmanship and coolness under pressure).

The biggest section (in terms of verbiage) of the Part 400 series of the FARs has to do with financial responsibility. This has everything to do with a little quirk of spaceflight. If you crash your privately-owned airplane into a house, you're liable for the damages--per international treaty. If you crash your privately-owned and -operated spacecraft into a shopping mall, the country from which you launched your spacecraft from is liable--per international treaty. So in order to obtain the FAA-required launch site license, you have to have liability insurance up to the limits specified in the FAA's regulations. Of course the government's attorneys got ahold of this one, and so it takes them page after page after page to say pretty much the same thing.

But there are practically no design or certification standards for spacecraft. Having a pretty decent knowledge of the FAA and how long things can take, this lack of standards is going to take a long time to rectify. It may be the Obama adminstration's intent to have the FAA cooperate with NASA in developing these design standards (and I hope they do; the NASA guys are the ones who know all about spacecraft design, operation, and maintenance). But until this happens this leaves a rather large and glaring hole in the entire plan to encourage commercial manned spaceflight.

History Lesson No. 1 Follow up

Ran out of time before work this morning . . .

One thing that needs to be made clear here. It was not the awarding of airmail contracts that enabled the early American airlines to get started. It did help, but in a larger sense, it just stimulated the overly competitive natures of their founders. Like a pack of wolves fighting over a carcass, they very nearly cut each others throats in their drive for dominance. In reality what brought stability and profitability to the early airlines here in the U.S. was federal regulation of the airline industry. To attribute the historical success of these companies to airmail contracts is to view the past through rose-colored glasses. Even after the airmail contracts were awarded, they still continued to try to drive each other out of business.

As the tired old saying goes, those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Like so much of aviation progress, the history of the early airlines here in the U.S. has its share that's written in the blood of the unfortunate victims of crashes. If there is not sufficient government oversight and regulation of the future commercial manned spaceflight industry, we will once again have to learn those lessons, once again written in yet more blood. And while an airplane crash is bad enough, with the speeds and highly explosive fuel loads inherent in spacecraft launches, a crash involving a spacecraft could easily exceed the worst air disasters. We really need to tread carefully as we get into commercial manned spaceflight.

Human Spaceflight: History Lesson No. 1

OK, still reading through the Review of US Human Spaceflight Plans Committee report, which has come to be known as the Augustine report, after the committee chairman, Norman Augustine.

One of the things that's referred to more than once is how, back in the 1920s, the US government stimulated the development of air travel by issuing government contracts to the newly-formed airlines to carry air mail. Aviation history has always been a hobby of mine, and I think that this particular bit of history has some lessons that we need to be aware of.

Yes, the government did indeed issue airmail contracts back in the 20s. When the first bids were solicited, there were over 5,000 applicants, but only 12 were selected. The victors, in an effort to expand and make more money, soon were undercutting each other ruthelessly on their airmail contracts, trying to take each others business. In an effort to restore order, Postmaster General Walter Brown, a very well connected Republican and close associate of then-President Herbert Hoover, sought and was given authority by Congress to award postal contracts regardless of the amount bid. Brown then imposed his own will on the nascent airline industry, consolidating the field down to just four: United Aircraft and Transport (later United Airlines), Transcontinental & Western Air (later TWA), American Airways (later American Airlines), and Easter Air Transport (later Eastern Airlines).

Three years later, in 1933, Senator and later Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black decided to hold hearings on the status of the airmail contracts and learned of what then became knows as the 'spoils conference' three years earlier, when Brown awarded the Big Four airlines their airmail contracts outside a competitive bidding process. Federal agents stormed airline offices around the country, seizing evidence of the grand conspiracy, and then-President Roosevelt ordered the airmail contracts cancelled, ordering the military to carry the airmail instead.

This in and of itself turned into another fiasco, as the military, after 15 years of neglect following the end of World War I, was woefully unprepared to fly the mails. They lacked the training and equipment necessary to fly in bad weather, and in short order 12 Air Corps pilots died in crashes directly related to flying the mail. Roosevelt was forced to relent, but to save face he ordered that none of the former four big winners of the spoils conference would be awarded new contracts. This is when the big four changed their names to match what we know today: United Air & Transport became United Airlines, American Airways became American Airlines, and so on. The big four managed to regain almost all of what they had, but two upstarts managed to shove their way in: Braniff Airways and Delta Air Lines.

Congress also got into the action, mandating that all airmail contracts would go to the lowest bidder, regardless of other considerations. They also established a time limit on the contracts, so they were periodically re-opened for bidding. This led the airlines to once again agressively undercut each other. In one example, Braniff bid on an airmail route from Houston to San Antonio (a distance of about 210 miles), at a rate of $0.00001907378 per ounce per mile, which would then result in a revenue of $0.004 per ounce per flight. Eastern, in an effort to cut into Braniff's route structure, bid $0.000000000 per ounce per mile--carrying the mail for free.

With diminishing revenues, something had to give at the airlines. What gave was maintenance, new aircraft, and crew training. Inevitably, this led to accidents and crashes, several of them involving celebrities and other notables. In a bind, the 'captains of industry' that headed the airlines went to Washington, to President Roosevelt, and made the stunning plea to have their industry regulated by the federal government. Riding the wave of public sentiment after the string of crashes, Congress and President Roosevelt created the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, which in turn created the Civil Aeronautics Board, which then regulated the entire air transportation industry for the next 40 years. So the airlines had their routes and fares regulated by the federal government, establishing state control over the entire industry (sounds sort of communistic to me, but it worked). No airline could operate between the states without the CAB approving the route, the number of flights, the number of seats on the airplane, the fare they could charge, etc. Essentially the CAB turned the airlines into public utilities; in exchange for allowing themselves to be regulated, the airlines were guaranteed a small but reliable profit.

The airlines had proved unable to regulate themselves into providing a safe, reliable service, due to their own cutthroat competition between themselves. The aircraft manufacturers during this time were developing better, safer, and more capable airplanes, but the airlines were only barely able to buy them, due to a lack of revenue resulting from their own efforts to drive each other out of business. The CAB regulations changed all that; now that the airlines had some stability to their cash flow, and that flow was sufficient to guarantee at least a small profit, the airlines could afford the better and safer airplanes.

Despite the firm grasp of Big Brother on all aspects of their operations, the airlines grew and prospered, and created the basis of the air transportation system we have today. There were major shake-ups after deregulation of the airlines in 1978 (resulting in only three of those original 6 still being around today), but we've once again reached a point of equilibrium (albeit a relatively shaky one) with the airline industry today.

So . . . if our goal in space over the next several years is to try to encourage commercial development of space transportation by contracting governmental flights through commercial entities, we need to be very careful on what we do. We also need to have extremely close governmental scrutiny of exact what those contractors do and how they do it. Unfortunately we don't exactly have much in the way of government regulatory guidance in place to make this happen. More on that later; I still have to work for a living.

American Spaceflight: Lack of Clear Goals and Funding

Having been involved in a number of projects of various kinds in my career, I've always preferred being on those with clearly defined goals, and have tried to my utmost to avoid those with loose, nebulous, undefined goals. It's much more difficult to hit a moving target, and where the target is undefined in the first place, it is impossible.

Sort of typical for a lot of Bush Jr. goals, NASA's previous plan for returning to the Moon and perhaps on to Mars was pretty well defined, but it had another fatal flaw--a lack of funding. More than anything else, that's what has done in America's manned spaceflight program.

Last year, the White House Office of Science and Technology commissioned the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee to research and report on the status of where America is going in regards to manned spaceflight. In their report, issued last October, they hit the nail right on the head in the first couple of sentences:

"The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources."

[Here's a link to the report itself; however this is a 7.62Mb download, so if you've got a slow connection it's going to take a while.]

NASA's finest hour came back in the late 60's and early 70's, when they flew astronauts to the Moon. This was a result of having both a clear mission and sufficient funding to do the job. The U.S.-led coalition in the First Gulf War was successful because we had a clear mission (drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait) and had the supplies (mostly materiel stockpiled to fight the Soviets) and funding needed to make it happen. It's not enough to make grand political speeches and burst forth in flowery rhetoric, spewing pre-digested sound bites for mass media consumption--money in sufficient amounts is required. It's neatly summed up in a quote from the movie The Right Stuff--no bucks, no Buck Rogers.

So, what are America's goals in terms of human spaceflight? The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy lists the current administration's goals (a link to the document here), which is long on those nebulous 'sounds-good' goals (including the typical 'grow the American economy') and very short on specifics. Nowhere does it spell out time frames or specific goals as to what America intends to accomplish.

Some highlights:

• Adds $6 billion over 5 years to NASA's budget to 'enable us to embark on an ambitious 21st century program of human space exploration', but does not give any specifics as to what that program would include or when it would take place.



• Kills off the Constellation program, which was to be NASA's replacement for the Space Shuttle. "Instead, we are launching a bold new effort that invests in American ingenuity to develop more capable and innovative technologies for future space exploration." (And here's the heart of the problem--for the first time since the early 60's, the United States will not have any sort of domestically developed or built spacecraft capable of taking humans into orbit, and not even have any such spacecraft in development beyond the 'drawing board' stage.) Again, this lacks specifics as to what technologies are being developed or when we expect these investments to start showing results.



• Extends the service life of the International Space Station to 2020 or possibly beyond. Of all the proposals made in this document, this is the only one that makes sense (to me, at least). The Bush Jr. administration called for dismantling and destroying the ISS (by controlled re-entry, crashing it into the Pacific Ocean) in 2015. In other words, after nearly 15 years of construction (and untold billions in costs) we'll just crash it into the ocean after just 5 more years. ISS should have always been a more permanent facility; in fact, it would seem to me that it's obviously modular construction would allow for at least a limited repair and replacement capability in orbit, provided (of course) that a suitable transportation system (i.e., the Space Shuttle or some suitable replacement) were available to transport and retrieve modules needing repair and/or replacement.



• Creates several new programs 'to transform the state of the art in space technologies . . . potential 'game-changing' technologies . . . all intended to increase the reach and reduce the costs of future human space exploration as well as other NASA, government, and commercial space activities.' Again, it's long on grand inspiring pronouncements and very short on details.



• Improves the global climate change research and monitoring system, and increases NASA's efforts to 'bring cleaner, safer, and more efficient transportation to our skies'. Once again, sounds good but short on specifics. Also, we're getting into some inter-departmental stuff here. It's the FAA (in conjunction with the NTSB) that's supposed to make sure our skies are safer. Furthermore, since the American A300 crash in Queens, NY in November 2001, there's not been a major fatality accident of a major U.S. air carrier. All the other commercial fatality crashes since then have involved regional air carriers, and the recurring theme with these is inadequate enforcement of existing regulations, i.e., the FAA and the air carriers themselves not doing their job--not a technology issue. There is no apparent technology that needs to be developed to improve aviation safety. But I digress.



• Calls for a 'robust' robotic exploration effort, to include a probe to fly through the Sun's atmosphere and other new astronomical observatories. As before, other than the proposal to fly a probe through the Sun's atmosphere, there's no specifics. Noticeably missing is a replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, which, with the demise of the Space Shuttle program, no longer has a means of being serviced and therefore has only a limited amount of time before it too comes down, burning up on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

In other words, our new space policy is long on fine-sounding rhetoric and short on specifics. Now, having been involved in a variety of projects, sometimes it's nice not to have specifics. After all, if you don't have a deadline, you're never behind schedule. If you don't have a goal as to where you're going, you're never lost. In both cases, it's very easy to go back and get more funding, as no one expects you to get anything done according to any sort of schedule or plan. In short, what we've got for space policy looks like a great way to spend a lot of money on a lot of things that may or may not work, and to continue wasting time, getting nowhere at all except for the possibility of maybe developing some new piece of technology. And while we're at it, we'll be 'creating thousands of new jobs' at the expense of eliminating thousands of others. It smacks of yet another big funding giveaway to the biggest corporations who may or may not be able to deliver on what they promise to be able to do, but that's OK--we don't have any concrete goals in the first place, so it's hard to say if they meet those goals or not.

Like so many other things, what the United States needs in terms of space policy is clearly defined goals and a rough schedule of when we expect to meet those goals. Of course, no one should expect scientists to produce 'game-changing' technologies on a schedule--if in fact they're ever able to do so. There's going to be 'dry holes', to use an old oilfield term common here in Oklahoma. But we still need some clear direction as to what course we're setting. And this is something that's clearly absent in this new space policy.

So what should our goals be? That's clearly something for debate.

I think that, in some respects, trying to encourage commercial space development is a very good idea. It's not as if there's not already commercial space launches going on. Boeing has their Sea Launch partnership. SpaceX has developed it's own rockets and plans a manned spacecraft (though at least according to Wikipedia has had only a 40% success rate with it's unmanned rockets). Orbital Sciences Corporation has also been launching commercial satellites for years. And of course there's Richard Branson's audaciously-named Virgin Galactic Spacelines, which, despite all the hype, offers only a suborbital flight that can only barely leave the Earth's atmosphere, and is incapable of reaching even low Earth orbit.

Many years ago, my wife found a copy of G. Harry Stine's book, Halfway to Anywhere, at a Dollar General, and bought it for me. In it, Mr. Stine documented what was the state of the art in single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft in the early to mid 1990s. At that time, it looked like a great revolution was about to take place in the commercial development of space. Douglas Aircraft had developed their DC-X/Delta Clipper testbed and looked like they were going to succeed in scaling it up. Lockheed had their VentureStar spacecraft under development, and things were going good. There were supposedly many different companies lining up to have literally thousands of satellites launched into orbit, so many that there was bound to be a bottleneck due to not enough rockets and launch sites to go around. There were all sorts of applications that required commercial space transportation to make them possible, and the financial payoffs were clear and just around the corner.

So, what happened? Douglas promptly was bought out by their great rival Boeing, which killed off the Douglas commercial aircraft line and the DC-X testbed program (on the left), among other things. Lockheed's VentureStar (on the right) lost it's funding in 2001, though the company has been trying to keep the project alive in a much reduced form. There have been a flurry of smaller competitors that have popped up here and there, gotten their requisite article in Popular Mechanics, and then faded into obscurity.

Why is this? If the future was so rosy in 1994, why did it never materialize? Because it wasn't all that rosy to begin with. It was, to a certain degree, a product in search of a market.

Businesses exist to make money. If they don't make money, they die. With big companies, they study things before they jump into anything, and then if the return on investment is longer than they thought, or is in question, they'll generally cut their losses and move on. When Boeing, for example, decides to develop a new airliner, they first study the potential market for that airliner. If there's no market, or not enough of a market, they abandon the project and find some other new airplane that more closely matches what their customers want. I recall that prior to the start of the development program for their newest airliner, the 787 Dreamliner, they first looked at a high sub-sonic airliner, that would get to its destinations faster than the current generation of airliners, and would therefore have the potential to make more flights per day. However, their market studies showed only a lukewarm interest, so they dropped it. Similarly, Boeing didn't see all that big a market for a competing super-jumbo jet to match Airbus' A380 double-decker, so they didn't develop one.

This is why no one developed a new spacecraft capable of carrying humans into orbit. The technology is there, and has been there for decades. There are no major technical hurdles--it's just that there's no market for it. Now, the Obama adminstration and NASA (by abdicating it's leadership role) is attempting to 'jump-start' commercial manned spaceflight by creating a market--flying American astronauts to the ISS, which is what the Space Shuttle and Russian Soyuz capsules already do.

Now, other than flying astronauts to the ISS, is there any other market for commercial manned spaceflight? There's tourism, but that's about it. Oh sure, someone might be able to offer an in-orbit satellite repair service (as was done with the Shuttle) but if there was a market for this service, we'd have already seen this happen.

Do we really want to have another government-subsidized transportation system? Something like Amtrack, but going into orbit? Is this really a good use of taxpayer dollars (or in reality, due to the massive deficit spending we're doing, with money borrowed from China)?

Furthermore, how long does it take to develop a manned spacecraft? The ISS, even with an extension/reprieve, is only going to be up there 10 more years. If it's going to take 6 to 8 years to develop a manned spacecraft (it's taken Boeing more than 7 years to bring the 787 airliner from the initial concept to its first flight, and it's still not forecast to be in commercial service until the end of this year, so a 6-8 year development time for a manned spacecraft is probably optimistic), and that only leaves 2 to 4 years for these new commercial spacecraft to have a market. Supposedly we'll have some sort of new program for something by then, but as I've pointed out above, there's no plan to develop something new. So, in order to make back their development costs, these manufacturers are only going to have a few years worth of launches, which means they're going to have to charge more per flight than they would if they had 20 or 30 years of launches to look forward to.

The Future of American Manned Spaceflight

Here's a subject that's dear to my heart--America's manned spaceflight program, or the apparent lack thereof.

About three weeks ago, I ran across an article on Google News (originally from the Wall Street Journal), saying that the Obama administration was planning 'outsource' America's manned spaceflight programs, eliminating NASA's Constellation program in favor of funding private-sector manned spacecraft. Included in this proposal is additional funding to keep the International Space Station in service for an additional 5 years beyond its currently-scheduled destruction in the 2015 time frame.


I was aghast. I was born in 1967, and can remember watching the last three Apollo missions on TV. My friends and I in preschool and elementary all had space toys (one had a very expensive kid's size replica space suit), and we followed the last few moon missions as well as Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz. Then there was the long drought until the first of the Space Shuttle launches in 1981. Through it all, all the years of my life, and all the changes and different places I've gone, the things I've seen and done, I've never lost the fascination with space.


It's been a given that the United States was at least one of the leaders in space exploration, if not out-in-out the outright leader. Sure, the Soviets had considerably more experience with space stations and long-duration space flight, with their Salyut and Mir space stations, but ours was pretty good too, and a lot more 'flashy'. It's part of the American psyche, I think, that our nation is superior to most (if not all), and one of the cornerstones of that is that ours is the only flag on the Moon. Neil, Buzz, and all the rest may have 'came in peace for all mankind', and that's a very good thing, but it's still our Old Glory that's exclusively on the Moon.


But now it seems that in an effort to save money, we're going to throw that all away, or at least that's what I thought at first.

The plan (or at least part of it) is to give government funds to private industry to try to 'jump-start' commercial spaceflight. The intent is that doing so will reduce the cost to put satellites (and people) into orbit.


I have some major reservations with this whole plan. However, as this is going to take some time, I'll have to break this down into several posts.

Hi there!

Well, I've been meaning to start a blog for several years now, and never seemed to find the time to do so. What I'd like to do is to just throw out some miscellaneous posts from time to time and see what develops.

The blog name, EufaulaCollegeofLoafers, comes from a sign that someone had posted in a second-story window in an old building in downtown Eufaula, Oklahoma, many years ago, advertising it as the home of the Eufaula College of Loafers. (If you've ever been through Eufaula, you know that the downtown area is really just a couple or three blocks long.) My grandparents lived there in Eufaula and the surrounding area for many years, and we grandkids would go down there and run around in the woods, down at the lake, and generally all over the place whenever our mom would take us down there.

My grandparents passed away almost 20 years ago, but I still have fond memories of the town and the area in general. It's a pretty typical small town, somewhere around 4,000 or 5,000 now (about 3,500 back when I was growing up), with some distiguished football players from there (the Selmon brothers and J.C. Watts, specifically). Oklahoma's largest lake, Lake Eufaula, takes its name from the town, and the town runs right down to the water's edge. It's hot and humid in the summer, and can get pretty chilly in the winter. Lots of trees cover the rolling hills that surround the area, and of course there's good fishing and some pretty good hunting, too. The town puts on a pretty good fireworks display on July 4th, especially if you go out on a boat in Eufaula Cove to watch it, with the fireworks reflecting across the water.

Anyway, I didn't create this to blog about Eufaula (though the Wikipedia article doesn't do the town justice); the Eufaula College of Loafers thing is just something that's been stuck in my head for years, and I had to come up with some sort name, and all the better ones were taken.