ARG@SU-AI@sri-unix.UUCP (10/09/83)
From: Ron Goldman <ARG@SU-AI>
n025 0930 06 Oct 83
BC-SPACEBIZ
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
c.1983 N.Y. Times News Service
LA JOLLA, Calif. - When the first Soviet satellite blazed into earth
orbit 26 years ago today, many people wondered what practical uses
could ever come of going into space.
There is plenty to do, according to experts on commercial uses of
space, as long as ways are found to reduce the costs of getting
there. And it will probably be small new companies with big ideas on
how to reduce costs that turn the first profits in space-based
businesses.
This was the consensus of a meeting held here this week by the
California Space Institute, a unit of the University of California
that calls itself the ''NASA of the West.''
The symposium Tuesday on ''low-cost approaches to space
exploration'' drew 100 representatives from the aerospace industry,
academia, banks, small space technology concerns and the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration.
There is a growing national consensus that space commercialization
is an idea whose time has come, said the space institute's director,
James Arnold, telling the group, ''Our destiny is in space.''
The institute was formed in 1979 by the California Legislature to
coordinate space research on the various university campuses and to
promote space ventures in behalf of California businesses. Half of
NASA's $7 billion budget is spent in California each year, Arnold
said.
Cal Space has a smaller budget of $2.5 million, he added, which is
spent ''catalytically.'' Last year 87 grants were awarded to
university scientists in areas such as remote sensing, climate, human
adapatation to space, astronomy, astrophysics and space physics.
There are numerous opportunities for businessmen in space, Arnold
said. The most immediate lucrative market is in the launching of
communications satellites. Future markets involve materials
processing in a space environment of zero gravity.
Several NASA spokesmen described to the entrepreneurs recent
government proposals to ''privatize'' space activity. These include
building a national space station that companies could use as a
space-based industrial park and turning over government-run satellite
launching programs to private concerns,
Speakers representing large aerospace companies said space program
costs had usually run high because NASA always asked, ''Can you do
it?'' and the answer was, ''Yes.'' Today, however, NASA asks, ''Can
you do it for less money?''
The answer is, ''Not yet,'' according to Robert Salkeld of the
Systems Development Corp., adding, ''We're hung with overmature
institutions.'' Improvements will come only, he said, with new ideas
on spacecraft structure, operations and chemical propulsion systems.
Some companies have already begun taking over space projects that
NASA would once have kept for itself. This includes the leasing of
space aboard orbiting platforms where experiments can be carried out
and the ferrying of satellites to and from the manned shuttles. Such
projects are to begin about 1987.
But it is the new companies with daring ideas that may pioneer the
commercialization of space, most conference participants said.
For example, Starstruck is a concern with 50 people based in Redwood
City, Calif. It plans to build, own and operate a satellite launching
service by 1987 that could cut the cost of such services in half.
It costs from $30 million to $60 million to launch a satellite
today, said Phil Salin, a founder of the company. If competition is
to thrive, there is no reason why that cost could not be cut by a
factor of 10 in the next 10 to 15 years, he added.
Starstruck will reduce costs by burning liquid oxygen and synthetic
rubber in its rockets, an idea developed but abandoned in the 1960s,
Salin said, and it will launch from the ocean. A rocket would be
towed out to sea and fired, he said, which would do away with the
need for launching pads.
With 80 satellites scheduled to be put into orbit in the next
several years, ''a market is there and some people will shop for a
bargain,'' he said.
Other small concerns at the conference had services to sell. Two
offered full packaging of the ''getaway special'' experiments offered
by NASA's shuttle program and another described plans to set up a
satellite-run location and information transfer system. This would
send messages among subscribers in North America using pocket-size
''beepers.''
University professors also suggested ways to save money and promote
space enterprise. Lynn Cominsky, a research physicist at the Berkeley
campus, said a university group would cut 10 percent from the cost of
a NASA satellite mission by doing the work on campus.
And Frank Davidson, an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, suggested that Congress form a space grant college system
in the tradition of land and sea grant universities.
''We see the moon as the next Klondike,'' said Stewart Nozette,
director of macro projects at Cal Space. ''And we believe a new breed
of scientist-businessman will get us there.''
nyt-10-06-83 1231edt
***************REM@MIT-MC@sri-unix.UUCP (10/19/83)
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM @ MIT-MC> One thing that seems obvious to me is that the best way to get something to space is to divide it into the part that's expensive per unit mass (irreplacable stuff like people too) and the part that's cheap to replace, send the expensive/irreplacable part via an expensive but reliable means such as STS or Saturn/Atlas/Aegena, and send the bulk part via cheap unreliable rockets like Connestoga or via mass-drivers etc. Then the two payloads must be assembled in space, which requires either a manned (oops, personned) space station or a remote-control tug. I wonder if a solar-powered tug could be used to move empty STS fuel tanks and random payloads to a high orbit where it could fasten them together in a bundle for later assembly and use? The tug could be a mass-driver, ion rocket, or sailship. Would these technologies have sufficient accelleration to overcome air friction during the first state of recovering a payload from very-low-Earth-orbit?