- Stiennon, Patrick J. G., David M. Hoerr, and Doug Birkholz.
The Rocket Company.
Reston VA, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, [2005] 2013.
ISBN 978-1-56347-696-9.
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This is a very curious book. The American Institute of Aeronautics
and Astronautics isn't known as a publisher of fiction, and yet here
we have, well, not exactly a novel, but something between an
insider account of a disruptive technological start-up company along
the lines of
The Soul of A New Machine
and a business school case study of a company which doesn't
exist, at least not yet.
John Forsyth, having made a fortune in the computer software
industry, decided to invest in what he believed was the next
big thing—drastically reducing the cost of access to
space and thereby opening a new frontier not just to coercive
governments and wealthy tourists but to pioneers willing
to bet their future on expanding the human presence beyond
the planet. After dropping a tidy sum in a space start-up
in the 1990s, he took a step back and looked at what it
would take to build a space access business which would
have a real probability of being profitable on a time scale
acceptable to investors with the resources it would take to
fund it.
Having studied a variety of “new space” companies
which focussed on providing launch services in competition
with incumbent suppliers, he concluded that in the near term
reducing the cost of access to orbit would only result in
shrinking overall revenue, as demand for launch services
was unlikely to expand much even with a substantial reduction in
launch cost. But, as he observed, while in the early days
of the airline industry most airlines were unprofitable,
surviving on government subsidies, aircraft manufacturers
such as Boeing did quite well. So, he decided his new venture
would be a vendor of spacecraft hardware, leaving operations and
sales of launch services to his customers.
It's ugly, but
it gets you there.
In optimising an aerospace system, you can trade off one
property against another. Most present-day launch systems
are optimised to provide maximum lift weight to orbit and
use expensive lightweight construction and complex, high-performance
engines to achieve that goal. Forsyth opted to focus on
reusability and launch rate, even at the cost of payload.
He also knew that his budget would not permit the development
of exotic technologies, so he chose a two stage to orbit design
which would use conventional construction techniques and
variants of engines with decades of service history.
He also decided that the launcher would be manned. Given the weight
of including crew accommodations, an escape system, and life
support equipment this might seem an odd decision, but Forsyth
envisioned a substantial portion of his initial market to be
countries or other groups who wanted the prestige of having
their own manned space program and, further, if there was going to
be a pilot on board, he or she could handle payload deployment
and other tasks which would otherwise require costly and
heavy robotics. (I cannot, for the life of me, figure out the
rationale for having a pilot in the first stage. Sure, the
added weight doesn't hit the payload to orbit as much as in
the second stage, but given the very simple trajectory of the
first stage the pilot is little more than a passenger.)
The book chronicles the venture from concept, through business
plan, wooing of investors, building the engineering team,
making difficult design trade-offs, and pitching the new
vehicle to potential customers, carefully avoiding the problem
of expectations outpacing reality which had been
so often the case with earlier commercial space ventures. The
text bristles with cost figures and engineering specifications,
the latter all in quaint U.S. units including slugs per square foot
(ewww…). Chapter 6 includes a deliciously
cynical view of systems engineering as performed in
legacy aerospace contractors.
I noted several factual and a number of copy-editing errors,
but none which call into question the feasibility of the
design. The technologies required to make this work
are, for the most part, already in existence and demonstrated
in other applications, but whether it would be possible to
integrate them into a new vehicle with the schedule and
budget envisioned here is unclear. I do not understand at all
what happens after the orbital stage lands under its parawing.
Both the propellant tanks and interstage compartment are
“balloon tanks”, stabilised by pressure. This is
fine for flight to orbit, orbital operations (where there is
no stress on the interstage when it is depressurised for
payload deployment), or re-entry, but after the stage lands
horizontally how does the pilot exit through the crew hatch
without the interstage losing pressure and crumpling on the
runway? Some of the plans for lunar and planetary applications
in the final few chapters seem wooly to me, but then I haven't
seriously thought about what you might do with a reusable launcher
with a payload capacity of 2250 kg that can
fly once a day.
The illustrations by Doug Birkholz are superb, reminiscent of
those by
Russell W. Porter
in Amateur Telescope Making.
Author Stiennon received U.S.
patent 5,568,901
in 1996 for a launch system as described in this book.
May 2013 