Contest-Driven Development of Orbital Tourist Vehicles --- Author: Al Globus
Traditional approaches to launch vehicle development emphasize the choice of technology, manufacturing issues, launch site improvements, etc. Although obviously necessary, this approach has failed to deliver and thus appears to be insufficient. For perspective, it may be interesting to consider the experience of the genetic algorithm community (the author spent several years developing genetic algorithms for aerospace applications9–11). Genetic algorithm practitioners solve problems computationally not by devising detailed instructions to solve the problem, but rather by representing solutions as data structures in computer memory, generating many random (and very bad) solutions, then evolving these solutions. Evolution is accomplished by testing solutions with a ’fitness function’ that evaluates quality, then breeding the best solutions with’crossover’ and ’mutation’ to produce new, sometimes better solutions, and discarding the worst ones. A rule of thumb in the genetic algorithm business is that when evolution isn’t working, it’s very often a problem with the fitness function, not the breeding. For example, genetic algorithm lore has it that there was once a project to evolve a robot that could navigate in a space filled with obsticles. A reasonable fitness function was chosen, the distance the robot could travel without a collision. The algorithm quickly evolved robots that found a small unobstructed space and went around in circles forever. This paper assumes (without proof!) that launch vehicle development is stuck not because it’s impossible to develop the technology (the equivalent of breeding ), but because the incentives (the equivalent of the fitness function) are improperly structured. Thus we attempt to improve launch vehicles not by directly developing technology or manufacturing processes, but by changing the equivalent of the fitness function, by changing the way launch vehicle development efforts are rewarded. All human-capable orbital vehicles to date have been developed as national projects by the U.S., Russia/ USSR, and China. For sub-orbital vehicles the picture is quite different. Spurred by the $10 million Ansari X-Prize, a change in the way launch development was rewarded, Scaled Composites, LLC built and flew SpaceShipOne into space twice in as many weeks in 2004. Interestingly, these were the only U.S. manned space flights that year as the Shuttle was grounded after a fatal accident in 2003. While Scaled Composites reportedly spent considerably more than the purse to win, other commercial deals involving advertising and technology sales netted a small profit.12 As a direct result, Scaled is now developing SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic is building a space port in New Mexico and intends to fly tourists into space for a few hundred thousand dollars per trip within a few years. Furthermore, Virgin has a couple of competitors. Not only did the X-Prize spur a promising effort to initiate a sub-orbital tourism industry, but over 20 teams competed for the X-Prize. Only Scaled won, but the other 20+ efforts provided training forwell over a hundred individuals in human space flight development. If $10 million may have jump-started the sub-orbital tourism industry, what prize might do the same for orbital flight? Orbital flight is far more difficult due to much higher v, longer exposure to the space environment, and high-speed atmospheric reentry. Also, failure is common, particularly during the first few launches of a new system. Only 5 of the first 9 Pegasus launches succeeded, 9 of 20 for Atlas, 3 of 5 for Ariane, 9 of 18 for Proton, and 9 of 21 for Soyuz. Thus, one might expect orbital flight to require a much larger prize. Indeed, Bigalow Aerospace has offered a $50 million prize for private development of an orbital vehicle,13 but this has not generated a level of effort comparable to that expended for the X-Prize. Not only is the prize money apparently insufficient, a differently structured prize may be needed.
III. Prize Structure for Orbital Launch Vehicle Development
We now explore the structure and size of prizes to stimulate the development of a large scale orbital tourism industry. The X-Prize was structured to provide a large fraction of the development cost in a lump sum, with the hope that flying tourists at one or two hundred thousand dollars per trip would turn a profit. This appears to have worked well, as there are a number of current efforts that expect to fly customers at these prices within the next few years. However, the lowest published cost estimate to develop a Earth-to-LEO vehicle is $400 million for development and $20 million per four person flight14 by Transformational Space Corporation (t/Space), and this may be optimistic. If t/Space could meet their cost targets and recoup all of development cost from a prize, seats would still cost at least $5 million per passenger. This would continue to limit the market to asmall number of extremely wealthy individuals. Furthermore, if all the prize money is expended on a single entrant, there may be no competitive pressure to reduce prices to the $10-100 thousand range that market research suggests is required to support a truly high flight rate..