"We know we have to face hard truths and take strong steps, but we have not done so. Instead we have drifted, and...fractured our economy...."
"...our greatest strength is the power of our ideas." - President Bill Clinton, in his Inaugural Address, January 20, 1993.
The long-awaited close of the Cold War has resulted in the continuing reduction of national security activities, and Federal civil space funding has levelled as public support for large space-related expenditures has waned.
Concerned about the clear possibility of a decline in publicly-supported civil space activity, the IEEE-USA Aerospace R&D Policy Committee has inquired into what can be done to see a rise in private-sector space activity and investment. It now believes that it understands what needs to be done to realize the economic promise of space. This report reflects this understanding. Almost all of the work reported upon here was performed by individual members of the IEEE-USA Aerospace R&D Policy Committee and its supporting IEEE staff. They were assisted by responses made by IEEE members in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area to the Committee's Project: Space Economic Growth Survey. Other IEEE members and aerospace professionals, learning of the activity, also made suggestions.
During this study it became clear to the Committee that it could not restrict its focus to purely electrical and electronics engineering matters if it were to identify the problems that beset the economic future of the space area and be able to suggest broad space-related economic opportunities. If U.S. space business expands generally, then electrical and electronics engineers will participate fully therein: "when the tide comes in, all boats rise." Several members of the Committee, and others consulted during the course of this study, are broadly experienced in civil and military space R&D and related policy matters. They helped provide the broad and fundamental scope needed for this report.
It also became clear to the Committee that a further extensive discussion of "issues," "policies" and "government reorganization" would not be fruitful. The past several years have seen a plethora of studies prepared by and for the Federal Government proposing changes in space funding priorities and programs, and changes in Government organization, practices, and staffing. While the political, cultural, economic and technical factors that underlie today's difficult and disappointing space economic circumstances must be appreciated, what now are needed are specific suggestions about what to do to correct them -- suggestions articulated with sufficient detail to allow engineers, but, more importantly, the commercial-industrial business community to give realistic and early consideration to them. Thus this report focuses upon specific business-related suggestions.
At this time, the Committee leaves it to others to debate what the public support should be for civil space-related basic research, technology development, planetary probes, etc. All such activities are interesting and, over the longer term, important. But today, all in the civil space community must be primarily concerned with the new and fundamental difficulties that afflict much of the civil space area--difficulties that must be dealt with forcefully and soon lest the civil space activity momentum, built up over an entire generation, be imperiled. Senator Ernest Hollings, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, put it quite succinctly recently (April 14, 1993): "For some time now the U.S. space program has been adrift, lacking sufficient direction to carry it into the future...." Thus the particular emphasis of this report.
For a decade, our Federal civil space program was carried on for national security reasons. For the next two decades, it supported both national security and scientific/cultural (planetary exploration and astronaut space trips) activities.
But now the United States has come upon very difficult economic times, has a great Federal debt, and is generating large annual deficits. National security circumstances no longer call for civil space activities, and the American public has decided that it must support other societal activities rather than those civil space ones now being conducted by or aspired to by most in the Government's space offices, the space industry and our space-interested universities.
For this situation to be corrected, the primary thrust of the Nation's civil space activities now must emphasize those which enhance the economic well-being of our Country. If growth in investment and employment is to resume in the civil space area, the private sector must provide them, not the Government. In principle, many/most space-related Government and space industry offices now accept this view but they are finding it extremely difficult to change from what they have been doing so well for several decades into a quite different kind of activity with which they have little useful experience: profit-producing private sector free enterprise businesses.
We have one--but only one--very successful example of private sector space business: the $5 billion per year satellite communications cum satellite launch business. (This is one third of the highly competitive $15 billion/year international satellite communications business.) We now appreciate that a, perhaps the, most important reason for its success (outside of a reasonably clear and sufficient market for its initial services) is that the cost of the space infrastructure that it needs, although great, is nonetheless low enough to allow it to price its services so as to meet its costs and realize a profit.
The poor safety and reliability, and enormous unit cost of today's basic space infrastructure elements simply preclude the possibility of wide-spread commercialization of space and, indeed, even serious thinking about space generally by nearly everyone outside of the Government and Government-related space industry and university offices. And most of today's thinking is done in a context where space is thought of as "the last frontier;" or as a place to exhibit "U.S. space leadership;" or as an opportunity to demonstrate "cutting edge technology;" or as a resource to be exploited only "for the benefit of all mankind;" or as a means to promote "international cooperation." That is, outside of the "information generation and distribution" area, economic considerations hardly enter consideration of new space activities.
The IEEE-USA Aerospace R&D Policy Committee is convinced that the unit cost of basic space infrastructure must come down, sharply, if we are ever to see space become an area of large and widespread economic value to our Country.
In this report, a number of ways of reducing these unit costs are outlined. They are ways known to many space industry and Government offices. But they have not received attention during an era when the Government was willing to spend great sums on space-related activities with only modest regard for cost. Today, bringing these costs down should be the first order of business for the space industry and the Government. Fortunately, the enormous space-related purchasing power of the Federal Government, and recently enacted Federal law, should allow and prompt private sector-Government cooperation to get on with doing so effectively and soon.
Indeed, the IEEE-USA Aerospace R&D Policy Committee urges that, by far, our highest national priority in space for the next decade should be to drive down the unit cost of basic space infrastructure--by two orders of magnitude.
As such unit cost reductions in space infrastructure begin to appear, we are convinced that our business communities will seek opportunities to do profitable business in space. To illustrate the potential of this approach, this report suggests a number of things that could go on in space of potentially large economic value. Such things are now not even being seriously contemplated by our business community because space is still considered to be a Government preserve. We expect that others will think of things to do in space as well.
In brief, we are "bullish" on space. We believe that wholly new space-related markets for goods and services will open up if we get space infrastructure costs down, sharply, and thereby encourage our business community to invest in civil space assets and activities for business purposes.
And inasmuch as it is now clear that our military posture would certainly improve in a more vigorous, wide-ranging and prosperous private civil space business climate, it should be in DOD's interest to pursue dual technology R&D efforts that address its requirements in close communion with the private sector.
The IEEE-USA Aerospace R&D Policy Committee calls upon the private sector and the Government to change yesterday's ways, quickly and decisively, and cooperate with each other with imagination, purpose and vigor to bring about the early and wide-spread commercialization of space. We trust that this report will help to hasten this process.
Unfortunately, except for the quarter century old example of the satellite communications business, including its related launch business -- which together still provide well over 90 PERCENT of today's private sector space business revenues -- a modest remote sensing business, the still small but rapidly growing satellite navigation/position-fixing business, and some relatively modest "spin off" and "trickle down" examples, civil space technology development and in-space activities have demonstrably failed to provide a satisfactory direct economic return on the enormous public expenditure made in space. Adjusted for inflation through 1992 and inclusive of the opportunity fund cost at a modest rate, this expenditure exceeds a half trillion dollars in the civil space area alone. Essentially all of the resulting business is in the "information generation and distribution" area. Very little business interest is found in any activities involving people in space despite the fact that this is the most heavily emphasized Federal space R&D area, i.e., Skylab, the Space Shuttle, Spacelab, and Freedom, have received two orders of magnitude more public funding than the "information generation and distribution" area.
The Department of Commerce recently estimated that private sector space business revenues, i.e., those revenues not generated under Government contracts, total some $5 billion per year. This is a financial return of only 1 percent per year (i.e. much lower than our inflation rate) on the total public civil space expenditures to date--and even a lesser rate if some of the large military expenditures which have proven useful to the private sector are also included in the expenditure base. Furthermore, it is disquieting to note that the Commerce figures indicate a slowing down of the business revenue growth rate, from a 1988-1989 increase of roughly 60 percent to a 1991-1992 growth rate of just over 10 percent.
In brief, the United States would have received a greater financial return on its space expenditures if the funds had been placed into a low rate savings account. That is, however important the great public expenditures in space have been for national security and cultural reasons, in economic terms they must be considered as "consumption" rather than "investment" items in the Federal budget.
This continues to be the case today.
Some would argue that the economic return on our public civil space expenditures are greater than that reported by the Department of Commerce. That is, the $5 billion does not reflect other less tangible but real "one-place-removed" economic benefits. Perhaps. But we are sure that everyone would agree that, if the Commerce number were $50 billion per year rather than $5 billion per year, our economy would be obtaining an adequate return on our civil space public spending.
In 1991, Michael J. Boskin, the Chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, told the American Astronautical Society:
"The Government has spent hundreds of billions of inflation-adjusted dollars over...decades of space activities. It is hard to imagine that we could have spent that kind of income over that long a time on doing anything we didn't know how to do without generating some significant spinoffs...I have to confess to you that economists have not yet been able to quantify the direct economic benefits of the [Federal] space program."
That is, economic return cannot be advanced as the reason for today's great Federal civil space expenditures.
For instance, consider the Country's major, and most widely publicized, civil space program -- the Freedom space station program. As it is now being pursued, this program can have little positive influence upon truly private sector business activities that would be commensurate with its great cost. As this report is being written, the Freedom program is now undergoing yet another engineering study to reduce its costs, and perhaps capability, prepatory to another political assessment of its value and continuance. (And, for political rasons, it may be related to a Russian space station program.) We simply assume here that an eventual design will be approved and will enjoy complete engineering success. Therefore, by the year 2000 we should be able to keep four people in Low-Earth-Orbit on a permanent basis. On average, two of these people would be free to do useful work not associated with Freedom's operation and maintenance. Each one of these productive professionals can be expected to cost the Country some billions of dollars per year for decades. This is some 10 thousand times the cost of employing scientists or engineers at the Earth's surface.
It is clear to all that, if business enterprise is to expand in Low-Earth-Orbit, much more habitable working volume will have to be available there than Freedom would provide.
But who would build a second space station?
Not the private sector -- at present infrastructure prices such a cost figure is inconceivably great, and would remain so even if present efforts to reduce its cost by one half were successful.
And not even the Government has any expressed intention of doing so.
In principle, in what it terms "commercial participation," the Government does contemplate that private parties could conduct some experiments on the space station, it does point to space technology advances of conceivable commercial-industrial interest, and it does say that it will encourage the private sector to provide infrastructure to Freedom in its Follow-on and Evolution phases. However, the Government then goes on to note that it will do so only if such private sector participation is consistent with space policies. But to date, these policies have been interpreted by the Government so as to keep the private sector out of any important participation either in the design of a space station or in the provision of useful habitable volume in permanent orbit for Government use.
In any case, the strategic plan for the Freedom program makes no provision for assisting the private sector to use the Freedom experience to provide private, profit-making, habitable facilities in Low-Earth-Orbit or much lower cost private surface-Low-Earth-Orbit transportation. In addition, this plan is projected by the Government to be operative over a thirty year interval subsequent to the commencement of full Freedom operation i.e., to about the year 2030.
Thus, economic considerations do not enter into the acquisition of this enormously costly space infrastructure and, like so many other public space expenditures, the economic returns to be expected therefrom can be only marginal at best.
This actual posture stands in contrast to the Government's rhetorical posture. When recent Presidents have submitted budgets for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the prospects of economic return are emphasized. For instance, in commenting upon the FY 1993 budget request, the then NASA Administrator said that the "increase proposed for NASA...is evidence of the President's belief that this investment...spurs the nation's competitiveness. ...NASA continues to encourage a healthy and robust commercial space industry [and] last fiscal year...saw major returns on the nation's past investment in NASA." But, then the "returns on investment" that the Administrator singled out were "(a) successful Shuttle trips, (b) scientific discoveries using the Hubble Space Telescope and Gamma Ray Observatory, (c) solar system body images from Magellan, (d) progress on the Freedom program,..."
However interesting, even exciting, such space activities are to some of us, and however many jobs these tax-funded public expenditures pay for, not a single one of these examples provides a significant economic return on investment. And NASA has recently concluded that "There have not been very many [Government to private sector] technology transfer successes compared to the potential...and past successes have been largely anecdotal."
Federal law (one section of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, as amended) states that "The Congress declares that the general welfare of the United States requires that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration [should] seek and encourage to the maximum extent possible the fullest commercial use of space." But only some 2 percent of the $14 billion 1992 NASA budget can be specifically identified as encouraging space commercialization. Clearly, to date this Federal law is being paid little attention by either the President or the Congress.
During the first decades of the cold war the national security payoffs for Federal expenditures on space, at first military and later civil, were great. And the cultural returns continue to be interesting. But our Country's political and economic circumstances now are quite different than they were when we began to make large public expenditures on space.
Now Federal concentration is focussed upon deficit reduction, private sector job creation, general economic growth, and international economic competitiveness. A new Administration has just been sent to Washington to bring about important, primarily economic, change. Change must now take place in the space area.
The constituency for planetary exploration (Mars) and settlement (the Moon) has been lost to the space community. In effect, many of this community's leaders have continued to ignore what has been going on in the world about them. They expected that the American public, faced with great and growing Federal debt and deficit burdens in the face of demanding social needs, would place truly enormous sums at the disposal of Federal space offices and their related space industry contractors to undertake massive efforts that could have little, if any, relevance to our pressing economic circumstances.
The civil space area, and the large public expenditures being made upon it, now must begin to play a much more important role in the economic growth of our Country. It can and it should.
If and when the civil space community demonstrates that it does have the economic as well as the cultural interests of the United States at heart, and demonstrates effective and convincing private-sector cooperation (not just an ability to conduct a large and costly publicly funded middle class jobs program) it can expect to see its essentially lost constituency begin to rebuild -- but not until then.
There are three primary reasons why there is still not nearly as much private sector investment and activity in space as there could, and should, be:
The unit cost (i.e., the cost/kilowatt-hour, cost per pound launched to orbit, etc.) of space assets and activities remains enormous by earthly standards;
Most Federal space activities have little relevance to economic interests, and expenditures on space have become excessively politicized; and
There is very little private sector thinking about investment in space businesses outside of the "information generation and distribution" area.
The unit cost to the Government of electricity in Low-Earth-Orbit is 1 thousand times what it is at the surface.
The unit cost to the Government to transport a person to and from Low-Earth-Orbit is 10 thousand times what the commercial airline passenger price is to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
And, using Freedom space station program projections, the Government's unit cost for habitable volume in Low-Earth-Orbit is expected to be 100 thousand times that of commercial office space in large urban areas at the surface.
These unit financial costs are so high that only the Government can afford to pay them and only the general public can supply the funds. Indeed, they are so high that the Government is moving to cut the cost of its Freedom space station by one-half or more, and perhaps even abandon its plan to keep a crew there on a permanent basis.
These great unit costs have not come down in three decades. Worse, under today's circumstances there is little prospect that they ever will to any great extent. Also, the reliability of cargo space transportation and the safety of passenger space transportation (measured as the number of passenger fatalities/departure) is some 100 thousand times poorer than that of commercial air transportation.
This situation cannot be expected to change until new vehicle-fleets, differing markedly in their fundamental operating characteristics from today's expendable launch vehicles (ELVs) and the quasi-reusable Shuttle fleet, are designed and acquired. But there is no national commitment to such a revolutionary space transportation course.
Almost all large Federal civil space programs are now chosen, or aspired to, to meet one or the other, or preferably both, of two "boundary conditions":
They are found pleasing to scientists and others who wish to explore and inhabit the physical universe beyond Earth, and/or
They offer to our space industry the prospect of very large technology development programs and to political leaders the creation and long-term continuance of publicly funded jobs.
However exciting it might be to some to have a few of us residing upon the Moon and visiting the planet Mars, doing so would cost the Government and, therefore, the taxpayers, at least $100 billion--some say 4-5 times as much. And there would be essentially no direct and relatively near-term (even over decades) relationship between such an enormous expenditure and the Country's keen need for economic growth.
Too, these kinds of space activities have another fundamental characteristic: with few exceptions there are no production runs of anything: one "Magellan" spacecraft, one "Hubble" telescope, one "Freedom," etc. Such one-of-a-kind multi-billion dollar programs see our space industry searching for profit in Government-funded R&D activities rather than in large-scale manufacturing and service provision where R&D is just one cost of business. As a result, such programs naturally tend to become excessively and unnecessarily complex and lengthy, and therefore very costly -- which removes them even further from the realities of private sector business considerations.
But, of course, such considerations have little bearing in the political domain where the logic of near-term publicly funded job creation and continuance are weighted very heavily in both the Executive and Legislative Branches, i.e., where the programs' authorizing and appropriating decisions are made.
In spite of continuing glowing rhetoric emphasizing space commercialization, the fact of the matter is that relatively very few in the Government and its associated space industry have a strong interest in applying themselves to helping our purely private sector space-related businesses grow and to see new ones created. Most would much rather engage in exciting (to them and their associates) solar system exploration and Shuttle trip activities, and not have to deal with the financial rigors of the private marketplace. And earlier failures to see the promise of "space manufacturing" actually realized in short order dispirited many in the Government.
Too, relatively few have had much useful experiences in dealing with markets, sales, pricing, costs, financing, competition, etc., and therefore are unable, ab initio, to be of much assistance to those business people who do. And they are naturally apprehensive about taking leave of those kinds of Government selected and managed space activities which, in the Apollo days, and in the early planetary exploration and Shuttle trip days, earned them so much respect and praise. Most simply do not want to change and take up new kinds of careers. Indeed, NASA has recently concluded that its employees, managers, and contractors "...do not feel [that] technology transfer is part of their job."
In the business world, there are usually many more things to invest in than there is financial capital available to allow such investment. As a result, there must be clearly discernable markets for the goods and/or services to be provided and a confidence that they could be provided at a cost that allows acceptable pricing to provide an adequate profit. But, with the exception of the "information gathering and distribution" area, the costs of space assets and activities are demonstrably so enormous both in absolute amount and relative to the foreseen market sizes that few in the business world are even encouraged to think about commencing space-related business or providing debt and equity capital to those entrepreneurs who would.
Of course, were today's unit costs to come down, preferably by two orders of magnitude, then private sector attention could and almost certainly would focus upon the provision of new space-related goods and services, for there are many conceptual business possibilities that now lie fallow because they simply cannot be afforded.
Thus, if the magnitude of private sector space investment and activity is ever to be greatly increased, the substantive questions that must be satisfactorily addressed come down to two:
Could the unit cost of basic Low-Earth-Orbit space infrastructure (surface-space transportation, habitable volume, life support, electricity, launch-return sites, etc.) be sharply lowered?
If such sharp unit cost decreases could be realized, are there potentially large-scale, seemingly attractive, business opportunities that could be explored?
N.B. This fundamentally different approach to "space commercialization" should relieve the concern of those who do not judge it to be in the Nation's economic interest to place the Government in the position of attempting to "pick winners." The synfuels, nuclear technology, and other large-scale costly Government-driven commercial-industrial R&D program failures come painfully to their minds.
Here, rather, the Government's role, albeit a vital activist one, would be that of assisting our private sector to reduce the costs of basic space infrastructure across-the-board -- costs that must be faced by all parties seriously interested in conducting space-related business. In doing so it would be following the very helpful precepts of Title V-Commercial Space Competitiveness of the 1993 NASA Authorization Act. (See the Appendix.) It would then be up to the business community itself, company by company, entrepreneur by entrepreneur, to decide whether or not, and how, its business interests would be served by entering the space-related business area.
It is now three and a half decades since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and, with a few exceptions, especially satellite communications, the economic promise of space is yet to be fulfilled. As a result, the general public, understandably, is becoming increasingly hesitant to spend large public sums on space relative to other things of rising interest and concern on the national agenda -- among which our Country's economic circumstances is the highest.
In clear contrast, three and a half decades after the Wright brothers' first flights, aviation had already become commercialized in the United States and Europe. The DC-3 had been in service for years and the Boeing Stratoliner was about to be introduced; the United States was served by more than 40 scheduled airlines; 2 percent of all U.S. intercity traffic was already carried by air; and transoceanic service was about to commence.
Whereas today the U.S. has no commercial passenger-carrying space transportation vehicles and no commercial space lines. Even worse, there are no clear prospects that they will come into being in the foreseeable future. Yet it is clear to all that the key to seeing space opened up to much greater use by the commercial-industrial sector is the availability of one or more new, much safer, more reliable and lower unit cost space transportation system(s).
We must appreciate that we have come nearly to the "end of the line" in attempts to improve the kind of ELVs that have served us so well. For instance, seemingly at best they could be designed so that their present unit cost would be reduced by one-half when what is needed is a cost lower by two orders of magnitude in order to (a) ensure U.S. space transportation competitiveness in the international marketplace on a true cost/price basis and (b) encourage a large growth in space activities and, therefore, a large growth in the market for space-related goods and services.
Fortunately, the Department of Defense has a modest, but vital, technology demonstration program underway that provides an initial context for the creation of a fundamentally new and greatly improved space transportation vehicle-fleet. After having studied the results of Government sponsored studies from four major aerospace companies, the Department of Defense chose one company to proceed with a 1/3 scale model atmospheric flight-test program, and expects to test/demonstrate many/most of the basic characteristics of such a new vehicle beginning in mid-1993.
This new kind of vehicle (entitled the "Delta Clipper" by its developing company) uses a quite different technological approach than that evidenced in today's ELVs:
The entire vehicle would be reusable after every space trip;
It would carry its payload to orbit without shedding stages, i.e., in a single stage, in the manner of aircraft flight;
It would provide a gentle low-G "ride" for cargo and passengers and would be inherently much more safe and reliable than ELVs and the Shuttle;
It is expected to achieve at least an order of magnitude reduction in turn-around time and launch crew size compared to the Shuttle;
It would place relatively very little demand upon the location and other characteristics of launch-recovery sites; and
With sufficient payload traffic volume, it could attain two orders of magnitude reduction in the unit cost of space transportation between the surface and Low-Earth-Orbit.
Since work on this Government contract has commenced, at least two other major U.S. space companies began working on basically similar, fully reusable, vehicle studies using private financial resources. And those leading the National Aero-space Plane contractor team recently suggested that the NASP could be considered for the provision of surface-space transportation of sharply increased safety and reliability at one-tenth of today's ELV costs.
If the private sector were to acquire and operate such a new kind of vehicle-fleet, it could price its space transportation services so that, in classical merchandising fashion, a small portion thereof would be offered at an even lower price than that allowed by the basic two orders of magnitude unit cost reduction. By doing so, they would accelerate the creation of an even larger market that, in turn, would lay the base for a lower average vehicle production-trip service cost, that, in turn, would etc., etc.
Short of the surface of the Moon there is no place in space where people can reside and work, continually, under acceptable circumstances. There are no hotels, laboratories, or factories permanently established in Low-Earth-Orbit.
Consequently, the Government is working to extend the time in Low-Earth-Orbit of the Shuttle-Spacelab combination to two weeks or more as an intermediate step to acquiring a permanent operating space station. But the limited utility and great unit cost of both, i.e., cost per year per Low-Earth-Orbit worker, does not allow them to be given consideration for use by private interests unless the Government pays much or all of the transportation and accommodation costs.
There is a much lower unit cost approach to the provision of providing Low-Earth-Orbit surface area and habitable volume that has been studied by NASA and private interests: the additional in-orbit use of the Shuttle fleet's external tanks (ETs).
The Shuttle's ET is designed to carry the liquid fuels that power the Shuttle's main engines and to serve as a "strongback" on which the solid-fuel boosters and the orbiter are mounted. Just before insertion into Low-Earth-Orbit each Shuttle jettisons its ET which reenters the Earth's atmosphere, burns, and breaks into pieces which fall into the ocean. During launch, after the Shuttle's reusable solid rocket boosters have burned their fuel and are separated for recovery, the ET provides the fuel for another 6.5 minutes until orbital velocity is approached and the near-empty ET is separated. Only some 2 percent of the Shuttle's weight-carrying capacity need be sacrificed in order to carry the ET to orbit, i.e., at an equivalent cost of roughly 10 million dollars.
ETs consist of 70 thousand cubic feet of separate, pressurized, hydrogen and oxygen vessels -- an order of magnitude more pressurized volume than is expected to be made available to U.S. workers on Freedom -- and another 5 thousand cubic feet of unpressurized intertank volume. The ET is roughly the size of a Boeing 747 body or a near-20 story building.
The concept of using orbiting ETs as habitable environment is not new. The very successful Skylab of the 1970s was fashioned from an upper-stage fuel tank of a Saturn rocket and soon thereafter NASA engineers suggested that it is feasible to put ETs into Low-Earth-Orbit. Other, private sector, space authorities agree that Low-Earth-Orbit habitable facilities could be created economically by fitting them with station-keeping, life-support, power and communication elements.
Each ET placed and retained in orbit rather than being destroyed represents roughly 1/2 billion dollars in avoided replacement value. Therefore, the U.S. hasalready allowed over 20 billion dollars worth of potential habitable structure to be lost to the Country's economic interests, i.e., enough to play for the acquisition of a restructured space station program. For, by modifying and outfitting it in an imaginative but hardnosed cost-conscious engineering fashion that takes full advantage of the lessons learned with Skylab, Orbiter, Spacelab and Freedom, such a structure could provide habitable volume at two orders of magnitude less unit cost than that estimated for Freedom. The marginal unit cost of successive ET facilities would be even less.
Perhaps the most immediately clear use for such structures would be as laboratory space in orbit, to supplement that to be provided by the Government's Freedom. Also, the ET's external surface area could be used to support various instruments to be used in the conduct of a variety of space-related scientific activities.
N.B. In effect, by placing ETs in long-term Low-Earth-Orbit,the Government would be creating "land" there for future exploitation by its citizens--the eventual economic dimensions of which simply cannot be imagined today.
During one year, an average person in our society consumes or uses over 14 thousand pounds of food, clean water, and air (not counting packing materials). Because this usage is determined by the person's level of physical activity and the conditions of the surrounding environment, it is almost impossible to reduce the amount over long intervals without causing serious health problems. As a consequence, if all these life-sustaining materials must be provided to people in long-term Earth orbit by resupply from Earth, the cost associated with keeping people alive in space becomes quite literally astronomical--on the order of $100 million per person per year.
There are, however, methods by which the amounts of food, water and oxygen launched into space can be reduced.
The first of these methods involves the use of life support systems which produce life sustaining materials by removing or recycling human wastes. Existing systems, for example, can regenerate oxygen from carbon dioxide and purify waste water for reuse. Although these systems do reduce the weight of life-sustaining materials that must be launched, many are either quite heavy themselves or require resupply of elements such as filter cartridges.
Therefore, a key approach to improving human life support systems involves using new, lightweight materials and technologies either to lighten or entirely replace existing life support system hardware. Some new, self-sustaining technologies, which require no resupply at all, can replace existing systems which do require resupply. (Various undersea vehicles provide some good examples.) In other cases, replacing existing hardware with advanced, lightweight technology has the potential to reduce system weight by as much as 50 percent. In some instances, this replacement offers dual benefits because the new technology requires less electrical power, thus making it possible to reduce the size and weight of the spacecraft's power generating machinery as well.
Secondly, although there are currently no systems capable of producing food in space, research and development efforts are being directed toward this goal. The development of such technology holds the promise of providing astronauts with totally regenerative life support systems, capable of supplying all their life support needs by recycling all of their waste materials.
Additionally, reducing the weight of life sustaining materials launched may also be accomplished through the use of selective container and construction materials. Properly formulated plastics can be used for packaging or other non-structural, resupply applications. These materials could be processed in parallel with human metabolic wastes to provide additional raw materials (e.g. carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, or nitrogen) to supplement recycling by the life support system. They could replace materials lost through leakage, with no net increase in resupply requirements.
Solar cell arrays and batteries are looked to for the reliable provision of electrical energy in space. But in Low-Earth-Orbit solar cell arrays suffer from two serious limitations: they and their related physical and electrical support elements are very costly and, above some 100 kilowatts, are of such great and unwieldy size as to suggest an upper limit on the amount of electricity that they could supply.
Too, the space station and other information-related satellites require fuel to operate chemical thrusters or electrical energy to fuel ion engine thrusters that are used to maintain altitude and/or orbital phase. In the case of Freedom, many thousands of pounds of fuel will have to be supplied for altitude maintenance each year at some 10 thousand dollars per pound.
But, in a converse Solar Power Satellite manner, renewable and environmentally benign electrical energy generated at the Earth's surface could be transformed into microwave or optical beams and transmitted into space where it could be received and reconverted for use on satellites.
Enough experience is already on hand to allow such a surface-space beam power transmission method to be employed. To date the difficulty has been that, given the size and sophistication of the required surface transmitter, it only becomes economical to do so when the amount of power required in space is large -- perhaps more than 100 kilowatts peak, or, more than 100 megawatt-hours per year.
But large volume commercial-industrial orbital activities should be the goal of all those seriously interested in the use of space as an important element of our national economy, and beam power transmission could come into its own in such circumstances.
Basic space infrastructure elements will continue to cost more than their surface counterparts for a long time to come. But today's extraordinarily wide cost disparities are no longer excusable.
Approaches to reducing infrastructure unit costs by orders of magnitude have been well known to Federal Government space offices, and in the space industry, for some time. But, sad to say, there has been remarkably little motivation on the part of any of them to reduce these costs. The publicly funded civil space program continues to be one of unnecessarily low activity, enormous public cost and relatively modest economic impact. Consequently, it is now vulnerable to any concerted attack by persuasive political interests that are determined to seek a reallocation of Federal discretionary funds from space into such areas as education, health service delivery, surface infrastructure improvement, environmental clean up, etc.
Too, costs have not come down because most in the space area simply do not think "big" about space -- they think "expensive", not "big", i.e. multi-billion dollar deep space probes and telescopes, multi-10s of billions of dollar Shuttles and Freedom, and multi-100s of billions of dollars for a human Mars sortie -- none of which would see as many as 100 people in space per year, if any at all. If we have large enough space activity markets, especially activities involving large numbers of people in orbit, then the unit costs of serving them could come down, which, in turn, would prompt even greater private sector space activity and create markets for space-related goods and services. This has been our experience in satellite communications, and there is every reason to expect that this experience would be replicated in other space areas.
Indeed it is absolutely imperative that we think "big" about in-orbit activities. For, in order for large space infrastructure R&D and initial production costs to be economically acceptable, they must be spread out over a large and continuing market so that the cost per pound, or person, or per kilowatt-hour, would be low enough to encourage widespread use.
We should also be thinking of seeing that the vast bulk of those travelling to, and residing and working in, Low-Earth-Orbit are ordinary private citizens--persons such as Jake Garn, Bill Nelson, Christa McAuliffe, the lady from the United Kingdom, and the Japanese reporter. Under such circumstances, many of today's very costly so-called "man-rated" space trip measures could be dispensed with.
Year after year our Government has mounted "space applications" and other like programs to attempt to "commercialize space." Except for the quarter century old example of satellite communications, they have not succeeded to any great extent. In effect, the Government will try to do anything it can think of except the one thing that it must do: see that the basic costs of doing business in space are sufficiently reduced so that our business community, not our Government, can be expected to commercialize space.
This section has spoken to the possibility of lowering unit costs by two orders of magnitude. The following section speaks to potentially large economically-focussed space markets that could develop at an early moment if our business interests were confident that such large unit cost reductions would soon eventuate.
The poor safety and reliability, and enormous unit cost of today's basic space infrastructure elements simply preclude the possibility of wide-spread commercialization of space and, indeed, even serious thinking about space generally by nearly everyone outside of the Government and Government-related space industry and university offices. And most of today's thinking is done in a context where space is thought of as "the last frontier;" or as a place to exhibit "U.S. space leadership;" or as an opportunity to demonstrate "cutting edge technology;" or as a resource to be exploited only "for the benefit of all mankind;" or as a means to promote "international cooperation." That is, utside of the "information generation and distribution" area, economic considerations hardly enter consideration of new space activities.
Today, just about everyone who waits to travel to space, or to see assets emplaced in orbit, or services provided there, is paid for as long as it takes to do so. That is, if private investment funds are not placed at risk in search of an acceptable investment return but, rather, public funds are used, there is little if any true concern for program cost or duration--the political process inherently favors this kind of situation.
Understandably, such non-economic program "boundary conditions" are much less difficult to live with than those faced by private sector profit-seeking businesses. Thus, understandably, such thinking concentrates upon activities/ programs initially expected to last a decade or more, such as a space station acquisition program, a new ELV development program, or a permanent settlement on the Moon.
Just as understandably, those in the business world abhor such kinds of thinking. Yet, if we are to see space activities grow in number and size, space-related investment grow, and space provide a much larger portion of our Country's economic growth, then it is the business world's kind of thinking that needs to be concentrated upon.
Therefore, in contrast, what follows are suggestions of activities that could go on in space that (with the exception of one broad observation regarding military use of space) are business-profit oriented. Consequently, they tacitly assume that the unit cost reduction goals outlined in the previous section are realistic and could be attained so as to allow such space-related economic markets/activities as are outlined here to be satisfactorily served.
Some of these suggestions are new. Some have been made for years but not been appreciated as yet for their great potential economic value.
It must be understood that the IEEE-USA Aerospace R&D Policy Committee has not made, because it cannot make, detailed technical-operational-cost-market-financial analyses of these suggestions. Such studies are not for the Committee, or the Government, or even many in the aerospace industry to make: they are to be made by those in our business community with the assistance of our space industry and Government, i.e., by those who can be expected to consider making private investments in space assets and/or space activities.
The satellite communications area has been an outstanding economic success and an instructive example of the great value of enlightened private sector-Government cooperation.
The advent of a fundamentally new space transportation capability-cost situation would present many new opportunities for those in the satellite communications and other information intensive space businesses:
The fundamental cost of placing satellites into Low-Earth-Orbit could be lowered by 10-100 times
Relatively low cost near-equatorial launch sites could be employed, thereby increasing launch efficiencies;
Much greater launch safety and the use of remote launch-return locations would allow launch insurance rates to be sharply lower;
Much greater reliability and rapidity of launch would reduce the business uncertainties related to today's launch scheduling and on-pad delays, and the associated cost of capital;
Much heavier and, therefore, lower cost satellite subsystems (such as large UHF-SHF antenna reflectors) could be employed;
Much lower payload launch "G" stress would reduce payload design problems and costs;
New components and subsystems could be tested-demonstrated in orbit quickly and at low cost prior to committing them to use in complete operating satellites;
The matter of in-orbit payload revisit for maintenance, modification and/or refueling could be re-examined under fundamentally changed economic circumstances; and/or
Perhaps spacecraft could be designed for much shorter useful lifetimes in orbit under the assumption that they could be upgraded as technology and/or markets changed, and replaced quickly at low cost.
That is, the unit cost of space asset acquisition and space operations should be greatly reduced. Consequently, the value of the communications, navigation, position-fixing and remote sensing, services provided through their use would be considerably increased. Too, the Govenment would realize a direct benefit--important cost reductions in those weather, climate, land management, forestry, fishery, and agricultural activities that see remote sensing data used.
Therefore, many now unable to afford these services would be able to do so, the market would be expanded, and new in-orbit activities and space-related services now unable to be introduced could be provided. In turn, this could lead to much more business for our industrial designers and manufacturers of space and associated surface hardware, for our providers of space transportation vehicles and launch/return services, and in-orbit and surface space-related services.
These information-related businesses are moving so rapidly that giving specific suggestions does not seem warranted. But it should be noted that the use of large numbers of relatively small satellites in Low-Earth-Orbit offers promise for new communications, atmospheric measurement, and remote sensing services.
For instance, sophisticated and powerful satellite transmitters could be used to replace all of today's surface radio and television broadcasting transmitters, allowing local broadcasting service to be provided at much lower cost while freeing-up much of the VHF and UHF electromagnetic spectrum for other uses--spectrum worth billions of dollars.
To date, civil communications satellite transmitters do not use frequencies higher than 20 Ghz primarily because of the excess radiowave signal loss associated with rainfall attenuation along the atmospheric propagation path. However, satellite transmitters could use millimeter wavelengths if their multi-lobe Earth-looking antenna patterns were narrow enough and/or if their output radio frequency powers were measured in megawatts rather than kilowatts. Optical astronomy techniques and in-orbit structure assembly and check-out should be able to provide such sophisticated antennas, and all of the D.C. power ever needed could be transmitted up to the satellite by very narrow microwave or optical beams radiated from the surface. Opening up the millimeter wavelength spectrum region could be an economic boon for communications and other "information generation and distribution" services.
The large (nearly $10 billion) Federal Earth Observing System-Data Information System (EOSDIS) program to distribute data (and related information) provided by the multi-satellite Earth Observing System must be treated as a national economic investment as well as an R&D program. Therefore, it should be organized and managed so as to see it generate large economic returns.
Transoceanic air traffic control still depends upon the use of shortwave radio communications. Certainly satellite communications could be employed to improve this situation. And the full power of space-related communications, remote sensing and navigation, in concert with digital transmission and sophisticated computer techniques, could be called upon to improve the efficiency of higher volume commercial air transportation operations, nationally and internationally, at an early moment.
In a few polls conducted in the United States, and one in the United Kingdom, when people were asked what they wanted to do about space (rather than what they wanted their Governments to do about space--the question asked or implied in nearly all space-related polls), 40-45 percent responded that they wished to take a trip to space. This response corresponds to some 80 million American adults. When extrapolated to the entire world, adjusting for varying country-to-country economic circumstances, this suggests that some 250 million adults world-wide are willing to give consideration to visiting space.
Based on such polls, some not unreasonable projections (made here and in Europe) for an annual international space tourism market suggest that, under acceptable space transportation operating and pricing circumstances, perhaps as many as some 100 thousand persons per year would be willing to pay to visit Low-Earth-Orbit, i.e. only 1 percent of those who expressed interest in space travel in the polls. If so, the annual space transportation payload could exceed 20 million pounds per year. (Today the entire U.S. civil and military launch payload is about one half-million pounds per year.)
While the first paying tourists have already visited the Russian "Mir" space station (one from Japan and one from the United Kingdom), a space transportation market does not exist--it must be developed. In air and surface transportation parlance, it must be "induced."
The Shuttle fleet should be used to explore the characteristics of this market and the kinds and costs of services needed to serve it. Space aviation and tourism interests should band together and, with the active and enlightened cooperation of related Government offices, set about doing so. And doing so in an imaginative marketing sense.
Two specific objectives should be addressed in such an activity: a delineation of the cost-effective performance characteristics needed by a modern vehicle-fleet; and a related delineation of the performance characteristics needed by surface launch and return surface sites and Low-Earth-Orbit habitable infrastructure.
The amount of nuclear waste generated by the nuclear power and nuclear weapon industries is very great when measured in terms of our present annual space transportation payload capacity. It is now projected that by the year 2000 the accumulation of irradiated fuel from commercial nuclear plants alone will approach 200 thousand metric tons, and will be increasing at a rate of some 10 thousand tons per year, i.e., some 20 million pounds per year. But the provision of safe storage anywhere on or under the Earth's surface for the required 10 thousand years poses great physical and political difficulties. The schedule for opening a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada has slipped to 2010 and may be delayed further.
The possibility of propelling nuclear waste out into solar orbit was studied by the Government a decade ago. Eventually it was rejected primarily because the particular space flight method chosen by the Government reflected the technological possibilities of that day which was then seen to be an enormously expensive option relative to subsurface storage (and the Challenger disaster a few years later raised the specter of nuclear products falling upon one or more of the Earth's cities).
But we can now see very much lower unit cost space transportation approaching commercial jet aircraft airline safety performance; the use of surface-to-space power beaming that could supply the energy required by ion engines to propel the waste packages into far-out orbit at very low unit cost after being transferred from surface-to-Low-Earth-Orbit space transportation vehicles; the location of relatively modest sized launch and return sites in such remote, very low population density areas as Antarctica, northern Canada, Greenland, Siberia or islands in mid-ocean; and waste packaging methods and means that would not allow the waste to break free at the Earth's surface even under the most serious explosion/collision circumstances, and would allow their quick and reliable location and recovery.
The basic difficulty to be overcome is not technological but, understandably, the great public apprehension/fear regarding all things nuclear. Therefore, a careful, studied and comprehensive development/demonstration program is called for involving the space, aviation and nuclear communities to arrive at, articulate, and obtain public acceptance of a safe method of disposing of nuclear wastes in this fashion at an acceptable cost--one much safer than nuclear waste disposal at or under the Earth's surface.
The world continues to be concerned with the provision of low cost electrical power, and its generation using renewable and environmentally benign sources.
Orbiting microwave or optical "mirrors" could be used to transmit renewable and environmentally benign energy generated in remote regions at the surface to other surface locations where it is needed.
Or, if it should prove to be economically advantageous in some circumstances, satellites outfitted with large photovoltaic cell arrays could be used to collect solar energy, convert it to microwave energy, and radiate it downward to surface collectors in an efficient manner.
To date the commercial market has failed to develop for either such potential service: the electrical utility community notes the absence of demonstrably cost-effective technology that would be competitive with today's ways of generating and transmitting electricity.
The advent of much lower cost surface-space transportation and working places in orbit for assembly crews, which would allow R&D on such technology to take place in space, could see these circumstances change.
A quiet revolution in scientific thinking about life sciences research in space is now underway.
At present its focus is on the safety and well being of astronauts/cosmonauts who expect to be confined in space for long intervals in the absence of the effective influence of gravity--on a space station, or (an extreme example) on a trip to/from Mars. The physiological difficulties observed in an astronaut's/cosmonaut's cardiovascular system, his/her reduced lung capacity, loss of bone calcium, etc., mimic what happens to all of us here at the surface as we become older. Perhaps what is experienced by people in Low-Earth-Orbit could be thought of as a kind of "accelerated aging."
In any event, many life scientists expect that many human changes occur at higher rates and to greater extents in Low-Earth-Orbit than at the surface and there is strong evidence that protein crystal growth is importantly enhanced there--growth necessary for the vigorous pursuit of one area of structural biology research.
Accordingly, an increasing number of life scientists are now urging that greater attention be placed on the conduct of space research that relates directly to the infirmities and diseases that accompany aging here on Earth, and even the fundamental aging process itself. The unique scientific research circumstances that are present in Low-Earth-Orbit open up extraordinary health and medical possibilities, for many important physiological processes, down to the cell level, appear to be sped up and/or magnified there. In the longer term, the results of such research could help to contain the Country's health costs that, already great, are increasing very rapidly as our average life expectancy increases, and have now reached the level of a national social-economic-political crisis.
But the number of scientists now expected to be at work on a continuing basis on Freedom a decade hence is only two. Given the unprecedented biomedical research opportunities that exist in Low-Earth-Orbit, and the potentially great economic impact of such orbital biomedical research, this number could well be increased by two orders of magnitude. If so, this would require the delivery of scientists, technicians, stores and equipment to Low-Earth-Orbit laboratories totalling on the order of a million pounds per year--about twice as much as the U.S. now launches per year.
Without the influence of gravity upon local human movement in Low-Earth-Orbit, wholly new sports could be created there, wholly new records established, and then surpassed. And with space-surface satellite telecommunications, all of the world could watch them.
Space sports would reintroduce competition, rivalry, heroes and excitement to a space environment that remains dominated by science and technology considerations that are of little personal interest to most of the public here and abroad.
Conducting and communicating space sports could prompt the creation of large new businesses.
Perhaps the first men and women athletes could be drawn from the space-related arms of the military services of the United States and Russia.
A very important result of the Iraq/Gulf war is that the mantle of global space leadership is now firmly worn by our Department of Defense. Two consequences flow from this:
The U.S. military should be encouraged to seek even further space-related force-multiplying capabilities; and
It must position itself to deal with other international interest seeking/acquiring space-related military capabilities.
Much lower unit cost, great freedom in locating launch/return sites, much smaller space transportation O&M crew requirements, a much more rapid response time,...would seem to suggest that qualitatively improved tactical capabilities could be acquired, deployed and operated. And these new space transportation capabilities could be augmented with much lower cost in-orbit habitable volume that could employ closed-cycle life support services and be supplied with great amounts of electrical energy beamed upward to them from the surface. Indeed, relative to today's actual and foreseen space infrastructure unit costs, the military could look forward to traveling to and from Low-Earth-Orbit and staying there for "next to nothing."
For instance, major Task Force and Theater Commanders could use dedicated surveillance systems; some space segments could make greater use of low altitude orbits and be much more widely dispersed; some space segments need not be installed permanently--they could be deployed, quickly, only when needed; response times could be shortened generally;...
Such capabilities would appear to be called for in the post cold-war political-military environment. And they could be much more affordable than today's concentrated and remote strategic space capabilities.
If so, there could be a large increase in the military's need for in-space infrastructure and transportation capacity. Indeed, a formal military requirement for a "clean sheet" space transportation vehicle fleet could be a positive "wild card" in the debate about the future course of space transportation development.
A final comment about these economically-directed space activity suggestions:
We should not think for a moment that a relatively few space-related engineers (as is the case here) can be expected to imagine more than a few of the economically related activities that could go on in and regarding space. This is especially the case where only a fraction of them are working or have worked for truly private sector business organizations and have been thinking about such opportunities for a relatively short time.
When space infrastructure is improved in the manners outlined in the previous section, and when its unit cost is lowered by orders of magnitude as it can be, many more American businessmen and entrepreneurs can be expected to turn their attention toward the possibility of profit-seeking space activities. And, in the nature of things, in time they certainly will begin to think of additions to and/or modifications of the suggestions made here, and conceive of wholly new things not even imagined today.
And so we have the mirror image here of the preceding section.
There are any number of things that could go on in space if the safety and reliability of Low-Earth-Orbit space infrastructure could be employed at a low enough unit cost. Large, profitable things, some exciting, some with great social or military value as well.
While an increasing number in the military space area are beginning to think through fresh space requirements and opportunities, very few people in the civil space area (outside of the "information generation and distribution" area) are thinking imaginatively and aggressively about its large-scale use. For either they are not sufficiently well acquainted with the infrastructure capability increase/unit cost decrease possibilities, or they do not see that such possibilities will become realities soon enough to be interesting compared with the things that they are now working upon.
This report is meant to gain their interest and to challenge them!
The space area is expected to contribute, and in some quarters is understood to be contributing, greatly, to the economic growth of the United States. It is not. It could be. It should be. It must be.
Only a very small portion of the Federal funds being spent on space activities are addressed to relatively near-term and large-scale national economic growth.
The Federal law requiring that "the fullest commercial use of space [be sought] to the maximum extent possible" continues to be nearly ignored by both the Congress and the Executive Branch.
Shuttle and Freedom operations and maintenance costs, the run-out costs of acquisitions already committed to, the "capping" and quite possibly significant eventual reduction in NASA appropriations--all make private financing of space assets and activities mandatory if the space area is to continue to grow.
There are a number of things that could go on in and regarding space that appear to present large economic potential. This report suggests several of them
But there can be no wide-scale commercialization of space unless the cripplingly great unit cost of basic space infrastructure--space transportation and in-orbit habitable volume, life support and electrical energy, and launch and return operations and sites--are reduced, sharply.
There are well-known technological approaches to reducing the unit cost of space infrastructure by at least an order of magnitude--probably two--with large enough annual payloads. This report outlines several of them.
Much larger space markets must be created in order to realize the low unit costs that, in principle, new, technologically sophisticated, space infrastructure would allow.
With sharply lower unit costs, with new large economically focussed markets, with greatly increased private sector participation and investment, space would make a much greater contribution to the economic growth of the United States.
And as our space-related business revenues increase, as employment and tax base grow, and as our international competitiveness waxes, the constituency for solar system exploration/settlement also could be expected to return.
And our military posture would be broadly enhanced.
In brief, the IEEE-USA Aerospace R&D Policy Committee is fundamentally "bullish" re space. We are more than willing to work with any business interest and/or Government office that seeks to see space become an area of large and widespread economic growth for the United States.
<[ Table of Contents ]
For the next decade, by far the highest national space priority must be the sharp and early improvement of basic space infrastructure.
Its safety and reliability must be increased by two orders of magnitude.
Its unit cost must be reduced by two orders of magnitude.
The specific technological approaches outlined in this report can be taken as initial suggestions to those setting out to do so.
In particular, we should concentrate upon the development and acquisition of a new passenger and cargo carrying vehicle-fleet (or fleets) that is much more safe and reliable, and of much lower unit cost, than the Shuttle.
The private sector should now take the lead in providing space transportation vehicles and service.
And we should do so as a matter of urgency.
Those Federal Departments and Agencies with important space-related interests and resources should focus their technology development programs on achieving great improvements in space infrastructure and great reductions in their unit costs.
They should solicit and respond to broad private sector, commercial-industrial, business interests in constructing and implementing their programs.
Of closely related high national space priority must be the exploration and creation of many more, much larger, space-related activities offering the potential of much larger private sector markets for goods and services.
The creation of large, economically attractive, space-related markets must be given as much attention as are the solution of space technology/engineering/operating problems.
It is important that the Shuttle fleet be used in such market exploration activities.
The specific market suggestions outlined in this report should be of initial assistance to those setting out to do so.
The present Freedom space station program is again undergoing severe engineering and political scrutiny. It is not evident that it will survive, for it continues to have great difficulty in dealing with the fundamental consideration of value (i.e., what is it expected to do that would be worth its great cost to the American public?). But the value of the Freedom program can be increased sharply and soon, and at essentially no additional cost to the Government.
Therefore, a Phase II to the Freedom program should be established immediately. In this Phase II, the Government should take the steps necessary to allow and encourage the private sector to provide much more, much lower unit cost, privately financed, habitable volume, electricity, and life support in Low-Earth-Orbit to be used in conjunction with much lower unit cost space transportation as it becomes available.
The private sector and the Government should, together, explore and prompt the creation of much larger economic markets for the use of such Freedom Phase II habitable volume and space transportation.
In doing so, the private sector, the space industry and the Government should take full advantage of all of the lessons learned from the Skylab, Shuttle, Spacelab and Freedom programs, and take full and imaginative advantage of the very important new Federal law that speaks most usefully to space commercialization, i.e., Title V of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 1993, Public Law 102-588, November 4, 1992 (concerning Commercial Space Competitiveness). (See the Appendix.)
In this fashion, the space station program would be used to prompt and hasten space-related economic growth.
Inasmuch as these thrusts are economic, not political, the private sector must play the leading role in their pursuit. The Government's roles are to act as an "anchor tenant" for as many of these new activities as possible, to pursue R&D activities that the private sector identifies as desirable, and to work with the private sector to identify national economic objectives and create national programs to meet them.
Both the private sector and the Government would use the large space-related purchasing power of NASA and the DOD--$10s of billions per year--to help "bankroll" the development of new space-related technologies, systems and services that promise to be of value to our Government directly and to our national economy as well. (See the Appendix.)
These Federal offices should reach a common understanding among themselves, and with our satellite communication business interests, that would see appropriate R&D studies made, technology developed and demonstrations provided to assist in making the most effective use of the electromagnetic spectrum, and to open up higher frequencies to economic use.
The Senate and House space authorizing Committees should break with the past and insist that, regarding "space commercialization," the Federal law be fully complied with.
Given the national importance of this matter, the difficulties that will attend making the changes needed to meet the Congressional intent, and the poor Government "space commercialization" record to date, perhaps Congressional oversight committees should determine if the required progress is being achieved.
Those Committees in Congress concerned historically with space-related defense R&D and those other Committees concerned with space-related civil R&D matters (particularly in NASA) now should see that such "dual use" technology approaches are effectively interrelated. (See below under Department of Defense.)
The President's Science Advisor and the Office of Management and Budget should search out ways by which related programs of the Department of Commerce, Transportation, Energy and Defense, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, are carried out in close concert with the private sector and in response to the Congress's will so that we obtain the largest economic return that we can from our large space expenditures.
Our military posture could not but be enhanced, and the cost of space-related military assets and activities contained and even reduced, if there were as much private sector business activity in other space areas as there is in the areas of communications, navigation, position-fixing and remote sensing.
Too, as new, much safer, more reliable, much lower cost basic space infrastructure becomes available, Defense can consider using space in new ways--ways directly responsive to rapidly changing international political and military circumstances.
Therefore, as it plans its own R&D programs, the DOD should search out every opportunity to establish them on a so-called dual use technology basis. Opportunities already exist for doing so in the space transportation area; other opportunities should be sought in the in-orbit habitable volume and high intensity Earth-to-Space electrical power transmission areas.
Appropriate space-interested business and professional organizations (such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Aerospace Industry Association (AIA), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), should be asked by both the Congress and the President to work closely with them to see that our Country's economic interests are vigorously pursued in the space area.
The Nation's private foundations have long treated the civil space area with "benign neglect"; some of them should now recognize the institutional/economic/political/financial challenges that it faces and help to identify and articulate related national courses of action.
"We are better equipped than any other people on Earth, by reason of our history, our culture and our disposition, to change, to lead and to prosper. The experience of the last few years where we have stubbornly refused to make the adjustments we need to compete and win are actually atypical and unusual, seen against the backdrop of our nation's history." -- President Bill Clinton, in his Speech on International Trade, February 26, 1993.
An Act to authorize appropriations to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for research and development, space flight, control and data communications, construction of facilities, research and program managment, and Inspector General, and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled.
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE
This Act may be cited as the "National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 1993".
TITLE I-AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS
SEC.101. FINDINGS
Congress finds that--
(1) investments in research and development are directly linked to long-term productivity and economic growth; (2) as a major driver of advanced technology, the space program can play a major role in the Nation's reinvestment in civilian research and development;...TITLE V-COMMERCIAL SPACE COMPETITIVENESS
SECTION 501. FINDINGS
The Congress finds that--
Subsections (1)-(5) ommitted
(6) improvements and additions to the Nation's space transportation infrastructure [could] contribute to a robust and cost effective space transportation capability for both public and private sector users;
(7) private sector use of available Government facilities on a reimbursable basis contributes to a stronger commercial space sector;
(8) the Federal Government should purchase space goods and services which are commercially available, or could be made available commercially in response to a Government procurement request, whenever such goods or services meet Government mission requirements in a cost effective manner;
(9) it is appropriate for the Government to act as an anchor tenant for commercial space development projects which have a reasonable potential to develop non-Federal markets and which meet Federal needs in a cost effective manner; and
(10) the provision of compensation to commercial providers of space goods and services for termination of contracts at the convenience of the Government assists in enabling the private sector to invest in space activities which are initially dependent on Government purposes.
"A Post Cold War Assessment of U.S. Space Policy," A Task Group Report of the Vice President's Space Policy Advisory Board, January 4, 1993 (see especially the Summary, page vii).
"NASA Admits Exaggerating Tech Transfer," Washington Technology, January 14, 1993, page 1.
"NASA Space Station Freedom Strategic Plan 1992," Space Station Engineering Division, Code DE, NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. 20546.
"Reviving the American Dream--the Economy, the States & The Federal Government," Alice M. Rivlin, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., 1992.
"Space Commerce," John L. McLucas, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991.
"Space Enterprises--Beyond NASA," David P. Gump, Praeger, New York City, 1990.
"Stages in the Development of Low Earth Orbit Tourism," Patrick Q. Collins, Space Technology, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1989.
"The Future of the U.S. Space Industrial Base," A Task Group Report of the Vice President's Space Policy Advisory Board, November 19, 1992.
"The Technology Pork Barrell," Linda R. Cohen, Roger G. Noll, et. al., The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., 1991.
"U.S. Commercial Space Policy Guidelines," National Space Policy Directive 3, February 12, 1991.
This report was prepared by the Aerospace Research and Development (R&D) Policy Committee of the United States Activities Board of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE), and represents the considered judgment of a group of U.S. IEEE members with expertise in the subject field. The IEEE United States Activities Board promotes the career and technology policy interests of the 250,000 electrical, electronics, and computer engineers who are U.S. members of the IEEE.
1993 IEEE-USA Aerospace R&D Policy Committee
The IEEE-USA Aerospace R&D Policy Committee wishes to acknowledge, particularly, the contributions of Jonathan Coopersmith, Texas A&M University, Steven Schwartzkopf, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, Inc., and Joseph Vick Roy to this activity. It also appreciates recieving the observations of the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) and a senior member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). But, of course, this report and its contents are the responsibility of the Committee.
The Committee also appreciates the effective support of Chris Brantley, Mark DeSantis, and Sharon Richardson of the IEEE-USA staff in preparing and distributing this report.
For further information or additional copies of this publication, write to IEEE-USA,1828 L Street, N.W., Suite 1202, Washington, DC 20036-5104.
Note: The Web edition of this report has been altered by moving this acknowledgment page from the reverse of the cover sheet to the end of the text.