Michael Kaufman
We will now do what we call a shift and share. Your assignment is to share your team's work with the folks from other teams that will come to hear your report. You will have three rounds to share your work. When you hear the music, change to the next round. After the final round, return to your original team.
Team 1: Human Health/Telemedicine
Team 9: Gene
You've heard some of this before. The idea is that all these guys are basically in the same boat. They've had some good results and all need $1-2M to be successful. They all need frequent flights to succeed. We're looking at small free-flyers and where there could be launch vehicles from two different vendors to fly one per month. Then you could accommodate a number of experiments on each flight. With six flights of 1000 samples per flight, you could grow crystals at a consistent level to provide them anywhere in the world. You have to fly something a lot, and that's the limiting factor to all of this.
If we had a manned facility, what could we do with it and how would that change things? The amount of money to develop a lab to go to space would be about $10M, which isn't out of range for developing any industrial facility. So we would begin with an unmanned then move to a manned facility.
Q: What do you think the six flights would cost?
A: Each one would hold approximately 20mg, so in the $250K range.
Comment: So you need power and a round trip to be successful at this.
The question is what is the overhead on a system and what's the integration path.
There is a tendency to jump back to the dollar-per-milligram model. That's not always the best model.
We want to maximize the payload. It comes down to more like a stadium. You want to fill it up as much as possible so the price per seat can be affordable. You need power and data together.
Q: Can we come up with the pre-flight model of the mid-deck locker? That's the challenge. That would help with the integration as well. Is that possible?
A: I believe it is.
You also have to have ground-based test units to test these things.
Team 2: Human Life Support
Team 4: Habitats / Advanced Materials
Where are the best markets?
Moon and Mars are farther out.
LEO is the best option near-term.
A near-term opportunity is Bigelow Hotel.
The Space Station is already a habitat in orbit.
We have to do something when we get to the moon.
Customers: wealthy adventurers, corporations
Anybody who would benefit from a habitat on the moon would benefit from having life support systems.
Value prop: LEO Tourism. Adventure, sports. Big market size. Sports bring in a lot of income on its own - professional sports as well as amateur.
There is skepticism on sports in general. Are engineers the right people to say that sports will make a lot of money in space? Societies have a hard time accepting new sports. Tried and true sports generate the income. The US has trouble accepting soccer.
We should be participatory and recreational, e.g. bungee jumping and extreme sports.
Team 3 : Space Craft Systems
How do we go about getting money for making a new spacecraft, without being funded by the government?
There are different payloads to LEO. There is the Cubesat program and 10cm cubed satellites. We want to be flying 20-30 satellites at a time. This turns into $50K per launch and is very accessible.
We identified four opportunities:
1) Each has their own required structure and/or power with lots of redundancy. Produce a platform that has lots of integration and is built on standards. You could give more payloads more power, space, and weight. More frequent launches. An 18-month lead time with a year delay doesn't work for commercial enterprise. Cost $7M + $1-2M / payloads = the cost. Add on some profit and that’s the business model.
2) $400MM satellite investment can run out of fuel or get radiation damage. The satellite is quite functional, but for smaller, less expensive parts. Extending the life of an asset in orbit. Service and support for current assets. $20MM to extend the life of a $500MM asset could be the basis of a business.
3) Space infrastructure for smaller countries to get into space without the major capital costs. We could provide communications, resource management etc.
4) Recoverable smaller satellites.
Team 5: Imagining
Team 6: Communications
We brainstormed a bunch of ideas on the back of this wall, then we narrowed it down to three areas of focus.
1. The first thing we talked about was the latency issue. How do we work to shorten development times? Most of the data from the moon is from the Apollo program. Information has to be more timely for the private sector. We then listed who some of the customers might be.
2. There has to be in-orbit common utilities and data storage.
3. The final one is the ability to do virtual exploration and tele-exploration of the Moon and Mars. Then we listed questions around these topics and focused on them.
Our group looked at power and propulsion originally, then we expanded it to include fuel for your propulsion system.
First we looked at using solar arrays. Then the fire brands in the group said we had to look at products and processes that generate revenue in space. And to do that we need a customer in space. Mike Griffin said that propellant in LEO would generate a lot of money.
The way to do it would not be to build a big dumb heavy lifter because that would be expensive, and right now, that seems to be what they're doing.
Then we looked at propellant sales. They encompass power, surface, propellant, delivery, habitation, etc. There's a whole bunch of things that are enveloped in here and will spur investment. Space exploration will be a byproduct rather than the issue.
The way this is set up it doesn't cost NASA money until the delivery contract is in place. We looked at what it costs to get propellant to LEO and FOB (Free on board - the surface of the moon) that's a freighting term.
The estimate of the market in LEO is 500 metric tons/year For FOB it is 20 metric tons/year. This is just the market for propellant. The LEO assumes you're traveling 2-4 times a year to the surface of the moon. This market size give us a general idea about market demand.
How does this help NASA from a commercial perspective? The issue is how do you mitigate risk financially. We thought of four things commonly done in government: 1) government guaranteed-purchase contracts 2) performance bonds 3) business development banks, and 4) is Title 9 loans. All of these things mitigate the risk to the commercial guy.
How do you protect the government?
The same way. I would have to buy insurance so that if I fail to meet my end I am indemnified.
We started with what domains the government is involved with. We came up with a long list, including national space policy, tax incentives, and many more.
We looked at the places or domains, including the infrastructure and things the government could do. It can help with incentives, legal regulatory, and infrastructure.
We looked at what kind of things it is involved with. These include advance purchase, commitment to services and products, coordination, and regulation. Then we looked at the right level of involvment for government - it should facilitate but not dominate. It should never be in the lead for management or in financial aspects.
We discussed when it should be involved and decided it should be during transitional government models at the point of inflection. We have to also look at the performance levels. We felt government should not manage or operate commercial space.
Michael Kaufman