Golden Spike announce Phase A for commercial lunar landing missions

[HMXHMX]

Actually, I think this might be just the thing for an outfit like ISRO or JAXA. They could afford to put up a billion per year. It would allow them to not only leapfrog NASA, but also to stay ahead of the dreaded Chinese.

Granted, it would be done using a lot of American hardware. But the people who pay the bills get to say which flag flys when the first footprints in 50 years are made....

A nation with Japan's (or even Korea's) aerospace capability will expect offsets if they become a customer.  They aren't going to send a billion or two to GS or Elon.  They will want to spend most of that cash at home, just as they do with military offset contracts for fighters and such.

[jcm]

Actually, I think this might be just the thing for an outfit like ISRO or JAXA. They could afford to put up a billion per year. It would allow them to not only leapfrog NASA, but also to stay ahead of the dreaded Chinese.

Granted, it would be done using a lot of American hardware. But the people who pay the bills get to say which flag flys when the first footprints in 50 years are made....

A nation with Japan's (or even Korea's) aerospace capability will expect offsets if they become a customer.  They aren't going to send a billion or two to GS or Elon.  They will want to spend most of that cash at home, just as they do with military offset contracts for fighters and such.

Exactly. That's why I don't think this plan will get many takers.

[RocketmanUS]

Actually, I think this might be just the thing for an outfit like ISRO or JAXA. They could afford to put up a billion per year. It would allow them to not only leapfrog NASA, but also to stay ahead of the dreaded Chinese.

Granted, it would be done using a lot of American hardware. But the people who pay the bills get to say which flag flys when the first footprints in 50 years are made....

A nation with Japan's (or even Korea's) aerospace capability will expect offsets if they become a customer.  They aren't going to send a billion or two to GS or Elon.  They will want to spend most of that cash at home, just as they do with military offset contracts for fighters and such.

Exactly. That's why I don't think this plan will get many takers.

China could have their own landing if they wanted. Same with Russia.
So could Japan ( at least a cargo lander at first, they would still need their first crew capsule ). Might as well and in ESA.

[joek]

Beyond his excellent tweet's, good recap from Jeff Foust at NewSpace Journal, Revisiting the Golden Spike questions.

[Bill White]

Rather than an "oversight" I tend to think not partnering with foreign aerospace entities was a deliberate choice.

It could be a "mistake" however.

[Bill White]

I agree, Blackstar. Except I do think GS has thought about this and chose to be 100% American. ITAR?

[AJW]

Re: Landers, the goal is boots on the surface, and if a lander costs a few billion dollars and a separate launch, I have to ask just what is required for a propulsion system to get a single person in a suit down to the surface and back to LLO?  Apollo 11's landing took an hour for descent, 2.5 hours walking the surface, and 3 hours back to the CM. Current suits can easily support this duration and LLO orbits are under 2 hours, so there are multiple opportunities for rendezvous.  Additional supplies can be pre-dropped far more efficiently than what is required for a manned lander, an airbag landing that is also a habitat with a suit lock comes to mind.  The LM was over 32,000 pounds, so the vast majority of the fuel was required for the lander, not the crew.  It seems like we should consider tent camping before bringing the Winnebago along for the ride.

[jcm]

Rather than an "oversight" I tend to think not partnering with foreign aerospace entities was a deliberate choice.

It could be a "mistake" however.

I meant "oversight" not in the sense of "they did not think about it," but in the sense of "something they should be thinking about doing but are not." Yes, maybe even a "mistake."

Then again, doing so may not solve their problem. It may lower their costs a bit, but the foreign government is still going to be wary of sending money outside their borders to fund this. So maybe it can reduce your costs by some fraction, but it doesn't mean that the country is going to want to pay for the remaining fraction. And considering that Golden Spike has to get multiple paying customers, not just one country, it could create other complications. For instance, Italy is not going to foot the bill for a German flight, and so on. Maybe it just doesn't work for Golden Spike.

And the prestige issue and visibility issue are also going to be attached to the launch site. The most logical place to launch to the Moon from is probably Florida, because you're going to want range support, a location that it not at a very high latitude, etc. But then the countries buying that flight will worry about newspaper headlines that read "South Korean astronauts launch into space from American launch site on American rocket aboard American spacecraft..."

I would agree but....

did you hear about the recent Sri Lankan comsat launch?
It was all over the Sri Lankan media, SupremeSat-1 is Sri Lanka's first communications satellite, Sri Lanka now has the ability to launch satellites...
  Actually, the satellite is China's Chinasat 12, which SupremeSat has bought some transponder capacity on - AFAIK it hasn't even bought the transponders outright - it's an entirely Chinese  launched, built and owned satellite but you sure wouldn't know it from SupremeSat's PR

So maybe they could do the same PR snow job with a human spaceflight mission.

[sdsds]

what is required for a propulsion system to get a single person in a suit down to the surface and back to LLO?

According to table 9 in the paper by French et al. (which you should read) it takes a STAR 48A solid motor plus a liquid engine on the descent stage, and a STAR 37VG solid plus a liquid engine on the ascent stage. With that arrangement their initial mass in LLO is 7602 kg and they reach LLO on the way back home with a final mass of 898 kg.

[Blackjax]

Back when I saw this:



I'd been kinda curious about why Dave seemed to be seriously kicking around landers since there didn't seem to be any way Masten could actually apply that to a real mission.  Now I know.

[RocketmanUS]

Re: Landers, the goal is boots on the surface, and if a lander costs a few billion dollars and a separate launch, I have to ask just what is required for a propulsion system to get a single person in a suit down to the surface and back to LLO?  Apollo 11's landing took an hour for descent, 2.5 hours walking the surface, and 3 hours back to the CM. Current suits can easily support this duration and LLO orbits are under 2 hours, so there are multiple opportunities for rendezvous.  Additional supplies can be pre-dropped far more efficiently than what is required for a manned lander, an airbag landing that is also a habitat with a suit lock comes to mind.  The LM was over 32,000 pounds, so the vast majority of the fuel was required for the lander, not the crew.  It seems like we should consider tent camping before bringing the Winnebago along for the ride.

We need to move past Apollo not less than it. The goal should not be boot on the ground. It needs to be a sustainable lower cost means for crew and cargo to the Lunar surface and crew return with some cargo.

[simonbp]

But if their customers are foreign governments, there is no reason to believe that those governments will sign a check to spend money in the United States that they would rather spend on their own companies, scientists, and people.

It's not necessarily mutually exclusive. Europe, Canada, and Japan have spent an awful lot on ISS, despite their modules being launched on Shuttle, and a large fraction of the rack space in those modules being owned by the US. But, they get station astronauts out it.

On a non-space level, how many countries build their own fighter jets? How many own foreign-built fighter jets just for the prestige of saying that they do?

[Nelson Bridwell]

Experience, as this company has, is worth a lot more. They have a selling point to investors now.

I tend to agree about the importance of experience , expertise, and judgement.  I was singularly unimpressed when I looked at the key people inside Moon Express, just a few software engineers with no aerospace experience.

GSC could be right.  There are several national space agencies that could afford to spend $1B for a manned lunar mission.  Look at a few annual budgets:

ESA: $5.38 B
Japan: $2.46B
France: $2.42B
Canada: $0.424 B

And it was interesting looking up the national flags that they chose for their PR photo:
Japan
France
Australia
Brazil
South Africa

At the moment they are in the early design stage and do not require major investments.  However, in a few years, when they enter the most expensive phase of development, construction and testing, progress could be delayed by the the timing of orders from real customers.

One thing that they should have going for them is a near-monopoly on manned lunar transport.  There are not any other potential contenders, with the possible exception of China.

[Robotbeat]

The best part of this is it changes the conversation about what sort of lunar architectures are possible. Not that no one thought about this sort of thing before, but it's good publicity for going beyond Apollo and what we used to call the Program of Record.

The minimalistic approach is also a welcome trend to counter-act the big-ificitation that sometimes grips systems engineers (and makes landers too expensive to start actually building).

Will this actually go somewhere? I kind of doubt it.

[Robotbeat]

I see old people which is indicative of the people that have Apollo nostalgia.
...

It does seem that the most vociferous Moon-firsters are about my father's age...

[Nelson Bridwell]

Interesting Alan Stern quotes from Q&A:

Boeing doesn’t ask billionaires to back new airplane. They go out and get enough orders they then go to the bank and get financing to start the project. We follow the same approach.

Long pole in the tent is the marketing and sales effort, which will unleash the engineers to put the expedition system in place. Landing vehicle is fairly standard technology by today’s standards.

There’s going to be a long line. Will be some shoving in line to see who would be first. When people see the success of those missions, will be even more countries in line.

[hop]

But if their customers are foreign governments, there is no reason to believe that those governments will sign a check to spend money in the United States that they would rather spend on their own companies, scientists, and people.

It's not necessarily mutually exclusive. Europe, Canada, and Japan have spent an awful lot on ISS, despite their modules being launched on Shuttle, and a large fraction of the rack space in those modules being owned by the US. But, they get station astronauts out it.

This is not at all equivalent, since most of the money they spent did in fact go to their own industry. The strong preference for barter in the ISS partnership is an argument *against* any of these countries just paying cash for something like GS.

A closer analogy would be the crew flights to ISS by Korea, Brazil and Indonesia. However, the cost of these relatively small, and in some cases they were connected to larger intergovernmental deals.

On a non-space level, how many countries build their own fighter jets? How many own foreign-built fighter jets just for the prestige of saying that they do?

Governments and taxpayers around the world accept that fighter jets have intrinsic value. The same can not be said about putting a paying to be a tourist on the moon.

We've seen this same hand-wavy pitch about "sovereign clients" from Bigelow and Boeing (in reference to CST100). I think the key is that it is not that hard to get someone in some government bureaucracy to make a non-binding expression of interest. Translating that interest to the point of actually shipping billions of state money foreign entities with no material or technical return is a very different story.

[pippin]

And it was interesting looking up the national flags that they chose for their PR photo:
Japan
France
Australia
Brazil
South Africa

Oh, you can definitely forget about all of _these_ countries.
Actually I would say that even all more or less non-autocratic countries can be ruled out.
This is no inter-governement thing that you can put up under "foreign relations", this is buying from a private company.
And - even small details than accountability and selling this to your voters aside - there are rules on how you have to play this, at least if you are in the WTO. Let's begin with: You'd probably have to start with a public tender....
OK, of course you can waive things like that (although I'd bet you'd have no chance to do this in Europe), but it required arguments and they better be strong....

No, customers are either private individuals or your favorite autocratic ruler who doesn't have to ask his people whether he might spend their money on his own pleasure. Nice company you're going to have there on the trip.

No, the more I think about it: this is going nowhere.

[mmeijeri]

A nation with Japan's (or even Korea's) aerospace capability will expect offsets if they become a customer.  They aren't going to send a billion or two to GS or Elon.  They will want to spend most of that cash at home, just as they do with military offset contracts for fighters and such.

If they used propellant transfer, then nations with an indigenous launch capability could simply launch propellant on their own vehicles, regardless of size. Once you offload most of the propellant from the spacecraft (not necessarily the transfer stages), everything should easily fit on EELV class launchers. A reusable storable lander should need enough propellant to make this worthwhile, and transfer and storage of hypergolics is easy enough. It doesn't add much risk (especially compared to cryogenic refueling), and could help with getting customers.

[MATTBLAK]

I can't help myself...