Space Access Update is Space Access Society's semi-weekly publication. Space Access Society's goal is to promote affordable access to space for all, period. We believe in concentrating our limited resources at whatever point looks like yielding maximum progress toward this goal.
For the moment, our main focus is on supporting BMDO's "SSRT" (Single Stage Rocket Technology) program, DC-X and its planned-but-not-yet-funded followon, SX-2. Space Access Update is thus for the moment largely about the technology and politics of DC-X and SX-2.
We anticipate a change of focus in a couple of months, if all goes well. Once SX-2 startup funding is (with your help!) assured, we plan to begin working on establishment of a healthy second X-rocket development track at NASA, and on getting development of suitable engines started for the fully reusable orbital ships that should come after SX-2 and NASA's X-rocket.
With luck and hard work, we should see one or more fully reusable SSTO testbeds flying to orbit toward the end of this decade, with production prototypes entering test a couple of years after that. Join us and help us make this happen.
Henry Vanderbilt, Editor, Space Access Update
[For more info on Space Access Society, write us at 4855 E Warner Rd #24-150, Phoenix AZ 85044, or email hvanderbilt@bix.com.]
[Editors note -- For those of you seeing this for the first time who need a bit more context, look for the subsequent post titled "DC-X Background".]
We have more info on the engine problems at the start of DC-X's most recent flight on September 30th. It's already been reported that the basic problem was helium gas bubbles being ingested with the liquid hydrogen fuel, causing throttleup lags that varied engine to engine. This caused DC-X to hang over the launch stand several seconds longer than planned, before the control system compensated for the problem and got back on to the programmed flight profile.
A more detailed sequence of events:
The immediate cure for the engine problem is repairing the faulty helium regulator. There are also changes being made to bleed off helium if the regulator problem should ever recur.
The next two tests are now scheduled for October 20th and 23rd, a week later than originally planned. The launch stand damage should be repaired in plenty of time for the next flight.
The engines themselves are fine. There is no reason to believe the helium ingestion would have done them any harm, according to Gary Hudson, who among his other qualifications to comment owns an RL-10.
DC-X's current funding runs out at the end of October, and unless new money shows up from somewhere, the DC-X flight test program will have to shut down by early November, despite being far from completed.
The immediate problem seems to be that the test program was paced to stretch its FY '93 funding to the start of FY '94 - October 1st. FY '93 funding to cover final construction of DC-X plus flight test was around $38 million, a tight budget for this sort of project. Meanwhile, though, the FY '94 DOD budget is still not passed, and may not be for several more weeks.
DOD is now operating under a "continuing resolution", essentially getting funding on a month by month basis at FY '93 levels. Unfortunately, this funding is not delivered line-item by line-item; major departments get chunks of money and then are responsible for subdividing it themselves. It looks like BMDO has not given SSRT any new money money under the continuing resolution.
There are three possible cures for this problem: The FY '94 DOD budget could be passed before the end of the month and SSRT's money expedited through the chosen funding outfit (ARPA, BMDO, or whoever), McDonnell-Douglas could public-spiritedly volunteer to pay for continued testing out of company funds, or someone could talk to the right people at BMDO and get SSRT a share of BMDO's continuing resolution money,
The first of these is nothing to bet on, the second is unlikely and may not even be legal, leaving BMDO coming up with some continuing resolution money for SSRT as the best option we can see. (BMDO, by the way, is highly unlikely to respond to direct pressure from the general public; we don't recommend such.) It is possible that this is simply an oversight that will be quickly cleared up, once word gets to the right ears. We'll see.
We've recently begun running into organized opposition to the "SX-2" fast- track X-vehicle development among the more-or-less permanent Washington space policy establishment, the senior Congressional staffers who specialize in space. This opposition mostly comes out in the form of attacks on SSTO in general, because SX-2 is hard to attack in and of itself, being radically different from anything these people are used to. The worst _true_ thing we've heard from any of these people about SX-2 was "But it might work!"
The most damning charge they can think of against SSTO in general is that it would take fifteen years and cost $15 billion.
This could even come true - but only if SSTO is done _their_ way, the way they reflexively assume is the only possible way: Development by a pan-industry consortium, supervised by a small army of civil servants from every government agency interested in launch, trying to leap from clean paper to an operational space vehicle in a single bound.
Most of these people really don't understand that there is an alternative to development by a standing army at a billion a year for ten or fifteen years. They think that recent history is simply the natural order of things.
The fact of the matter is that you only throw an army at a problem, and grind it down in endless overkill on every detail, under two circumstances:
This standing-army-development-as-jobs-program approach tends to produce results ranging from marginal to disastrous. The people involved can't help knowing they're drawing hi-tech welfare, not working on a national priority. Only a pervasive sense of urgency can overcome paper-pusher inertia in a standing-army project; when the urgency is absent, the project bogs down.
As for the space launch problem being overwhelmingly large, Apollo essentially ended that. We learned enough going to the Moon that afterwards, we could have gone back to developing space launchers the way we developed supersonic aircraft: Via a series of engineering testbeds, "X-vehicles", built by small highly talented teams, as quick and cheap and off-the-shelf as possible, the only requirement being to fly as high and fast as the state of the art allowed, in order to gain the experience to further advance the state of the art in the next X-vehicle a year or two later.
But we had a standing army to keep employed...
We must not make that mistake again. The future space launch capability of this nation must not be treated as a hi-tech jobs program.
DC-X has pointed the way. In three years, for around $100 million a year, SX-2 can put us in a position to make rational decisions based on actual flight test data about the future launch requirements of our nation. SX-2 can also reinforce DC-X's demonstration of a far more affordable approach to spacecraft development than the discredited "standing army" method.
- Henry Vanderbilt
We're in the home stretch of this year's DOD funding process. The House-Senate Defence Authorizations conference should meet tomorrow, Tuesday, and get down to business. The most recent info we have is that the entire Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) wil take part, along with about thirty of their House Armed Services Committee counterparts.
We have strong support on the House side, from HASC chair Ron Dellums and from HASC Research & Technology Subcommittee chair Patricia Schroeder.
We have problems on the Senate side, in particular within the office of Senator Strom Thurmond, the Ranking Republican member of SASC, where an SASC staffer named Mansfield has emerged as strongly opposed to SX-2 funding. In general we're going into the conference with only scattered support on the Senate side. We need to do all we can to improve that, and one way to do that is to convince Thurmond, the minority party leader in SASC, that SX-2 deserves his support.
We have similar problems on the Senate side of the upcoming House-Senate Defense Appropriations conference, but the current best guess is this will not happen until next week at the earliest - the Senate has not passed its DOD Appropriations bill yet, and they will likely end up spending a fair amount of time debating Somalia and Haiti before they do.
Call, write, or fax:
Ask them to support, in the DOD Authorization conference, the House Defense Authorization language that provides $79 million for BMDO's Single Stage Rocket Technology (SSRT) program. Emphasize if you get the chance that the "SX-2" project this starts up will fly in three years for around a hundred million a year, allowing a fully informed decision three years from now on any further pursuit of SSTO launch vehicles. Emphasize that if there's any doubt about that schedule and budget, they should look at DC-X, which flew in two years for $60 million.
If you have a local Representative on the House side of this conference, and you haven't already contacted them in support of SSRT Followon funding, you should do that as well. List of HASC conference participants follows after the SASC list.
-- Conferees from the Senate Armed Services Committee (the whole SASC) --
("Senator XYZ", office#, "Washington DC 20510" will get mail to them.)
(* = voted for the Domenici Amendment favoring full funding for SSRT.)
Name office# phone fax (AC 202)
Sam Nunn (D-GA) SASC Chair SD-303 224-3521 224-0072
Strom Thurmond (R-SC) RRM SR-217 224-5972 224-1300
James Exon (D-NE) "Nuke" Chair SH-528 224-4224 224-5213
John McCain (R-AZ) SR-111 224-2235 224-8938
*Richard C. Shelby (D-AL) SH-509 224-5744 224-3416
William S. Cohen (R-ME) SH-322 224-2523 224-2693
Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) SR-315 224-4543 224-2417
Carl Levin (D-MI) SR-459 224-6221 224-1388
Dan Coats (R-IN) SR-404 224-5623 224-1966
*Trent Lott (R-MS) SR-487 224-6253 224-2262
*Bob Smith (R-NH) SD-332 224-2841 224-1353
*Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) SH-110 224-5521 224-1810
*John Glenn (D-OH) SH-503 224-3353 224-7983
John Warner (R-VA) SR-225 224-2023 224-6295
Joseph I. Lieberman (D-CT) SH-316 224-4041 224-9750
Bob Graham (D-FL) SH-524 224-3041 224-6843
*Dirk Kempthorne (D-ID) SD-367 224-6142 224-5893
Lauch Faircloth (R-NC) SH-702 224-3154 224-7406
Charles S. Robb (D-VA) SR-493 224-4024 224-8689
Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) SH-311 224-3954 224-8070
*Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) SH-703 224-5922 224-0776
-- Likely Conferees from the House Armed Services Committee --
(all phone #'s in 202 area code, all addresses are Washington DC 20515,
in either the Cannon, Longworth, or Rayburn House Office Buildings.
Rep. Dellums' address, for instance, would be written as:
Representative Dellums
2136 Rayburn HOB
Washington DC 20515 )
(Absent a specific office address, "Representative XYZ, Washington DC 20515"
has a reasonable chance of working. Apologies for the missing addresses.)
phone fax address
Ron Dellums, D 9 CA HASC Chair 225-2661 225-9817 2136 RHOB
Floyd Spence, R 2 SC HASC RRM 225-2452 225-2455 2405 RHOB
Patricia Schroeder, D 1 CO 225-4431 225-5842 2208 RHOB
Earl Hutto, D 1 FL 225-4136 225-5785 2435 RHOB
Dave McCurdy, D 4 OK 225-6165 225-9746 2344 RHOB
Bob Stump, R 3 AZ 225-4576 225-6328 211 CHOB
Duncan Hunter, R 52 CA 225-5672 225-0235 133 CHOB
John R Kasich, R 12 OH 225-5355 ? 1131 LHOB
James V Hansen, R 1 UT 225-0453 225-5857 2466 RHOB
Ike Skelton, D MO 225-2876 225-2695 ?
Jon Kyl, R AZ 225-3361 225-1143 ?
Norman Sisiky, D VA 225-6365 226-1170 ?
Browder, Glen, D AL 225-9020 225-3261 ?
Dornan , Robert R CA 225-2965 ?
Hefley, Joel R CO 225-1942 225-4422 ?
McCloskey, Frank D IN 225-4688 225-4636 ?
Evans, Lane D IL 225-5396 225-5905 ?
Montgomery, G.V. D MS 225-3375 225-5031 ?
Bilbray, James D NV 225-8808 225-5965 ?
Hochbrueckner, GeorgeD NY 225-0776 225-3826 ?
Lancaster, H. Martin D NC 225-0666 225-3415 ?
Weldon, Curt R PA 225-8137 225-2011 ?
Machtley, Ronald R RI 225-4417 225-4911 ?
Spratt,, John D SC 225-0464 225-5501 ?
Ravenel,, Arthur R SC 225-4340 225-3176 ?
Lloyd, Marilyn D TN 225-6974 225-3271 ?
Ortiz, Solomon D TX 226-1134 225-7742 ?
Bateman, Herbert R VA 225-4382 225-4261 ?
Pickett, Owen D VA 225-4218 225-4215 ?
For some tips on making effective contact, see the Politics section of the subsequent "DC-X Background" posting.
Henry Vanderbilt "Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere Executive Director, in the Solar System." Space Access Society - Robert A. Heinlein hvanderbilt@bix.com "You can't get there from here." 602 431-9283 voice/fax - Anonymous -- Permission granted to redistribute the full and unaltered text of this -- -- piece, including the copyright and this notice. All other rights -- -- reserved. In other words, intact crossposting is strongly encouraged. --