Hey. I occasionally do science articles for Strange Horizons e-zine (a link to my articles, so you know I'm not joshing-- Articles (http://www.strangehorizons.com/Archive.alt.pl?Dept=all&Stng=paul+lucas&Sort=chron&Catx=))

Anyway, I was planning on maybe doing an article on how "secondary" powers--countries like Canada, Brazil, South Africa, etc--could bootstrap themselves up to catch-up and compete with the big boys like the US and Russia in space. The emphasis is how they could do it on the cheap--SpaceShip One proved spaceflight doesn't require billions upon billions to achieve--and how they could maybe use good, proven technologies abandoned by NASA and other major agencies over the years (like the DC-X, aerospike rockets, and others.) I was planning on using Australia as a test case using about 1-2% of their annual budget over 25 years to catch up, assuming they had the national drive to do so.

So say you were put in charge of the project for Australia--how would you go about doing it?

I would like to add a cautious note to this admirable general idea.

Although spectacular, SS1 is a long way from orbital ability.

The abondoned technologies might have been abandoned for good reasons. They may have been failure prone, uneconomical, perhaps just simply too dangerous. The general concept is excellent, but any candidate technology should be very carefully scrutinized.

Do we believe that any present state of the art space technology has not had its safety improved over the previous? It's an old joke, but just imagine yourself strapped in and waiting for ignition and you look around and realize that everything was supplied by the lowest bidder. :eek:

DISCLAIMER: I am not against Ozzie, the next Australian Space Director taking down 5 Australian per and becoming famous.

GOOD NEWS: There are people who COULD give you a plan that could put you into space at a fraction of NASA budget and do it relatively quickly.

BAD NEWS: There are people who won't GIVE you a plan that could put you into space at a fraction of NASA budget and do it relatively quickly.

G'day, mate.

I'm well aware that SS1 had only two suborbital flights. And scaling up for orbital missions would probably cost much more, but NOT nearly as much as it did NASA or the Soviets--I'd guess maybe a $100 million to $200 million (US) investment. Today, we have a much better idea of what works and what doesn't, and a lot of proven technology either on the shelves or that can be readily fabricated for such things.

Safety is always an issue, but just because you spend a lot of money on a vehicle does not necessarily make it any safer. Just look at the Space Shuttles, which have had many billions and billions of dollars poured into them, and are the most intensely scrutinized and inspected vehicles on Earth, and we still lost two of the catastrophically.

Anyway, I'm gonna put up some of the ideas I had for the article, if for nothing else than to use the forum here as a sounding board. Feel free to comment on or criticize anything I may go into here. I realize some of the political assumptions made here may be unrealistic, but this IS supposed to be just an exercise in speculation. :D

TEST CASE COUNTRY: I chose Australia as the test case for the article mainly because it seems the best poised of the "secondary" powers to create a fully-active space program independent of the big boys. European countries will probably always be associated with ESA, and Canada will probably always be associated with the US program, and the asian countries that are most capable of producing space programs (China, Japan, India) already have them, even if the latter two are somewhat modest in scope. The other major candidate was Brazil, which already has some rocket launch facilities it is leasing out to other countries, but I wanted a nation that could start basically from scratch.

RATIONALE: Space Flight is a means of procuring large amounts of international prestige without having to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in a huge military. China understood that to be taken more seriously as a world leader, it had to demonstrate it had a pair technologically and politically, and ultimately manned spaceflight is easier and cheaper and far more PR-friendly than invading another country.

An industrialized, comparatively well-off, but somewhat laid-back non-world power like Australia may wake up one day and realize that the major powers are leaving it behind, and in a few generations they may become nothing more than a quaint backwater on the world stage. With their comparatively modest population, they can't compete with the big boys militarily or economically, so in my scenario they decide to build themselves up as a technological power instead, with space flight as their crown jewel.

And of course space programs have a great deal of other benefits as well, economic, technological, national pride, etc.

PHASE ONE: TALENT SEARCH. Since its already assumed both the national will and a decent budget is already in place, the very first thing a reformed Australian Space Agency or ASA (I guess they used to have a modest one dedicated mostly toward education that was disbanded in 1997) would have to do is attract Talent. And by Talent I mean engineers, scientist, technicians, and visionaries to help them construct a viable space flight infrastructure. They would have to begin aggressively recruiting Talent from other countries, investing a good percentage of their initial budget in economic incentives to lure them. Even more importantly, they would also need to create scholarship and incentive programs internally to prodce a new generation of home-grown space visionaries so they can be less dependent on foreign help as the program progresses.

PHASE TWO: CREATING A PROGRAM ARCHITECTURE. One thing the Soviets did much smarter than NASA was in creating and implementing an overall, methodical architecture to their space program. Whereas NASA was oriented toward specific missions, the Soviets were oriented toward overall goals. Both approaches had their advantages and disadvantages, but for the ASA the Soviet approach would seem more appropriate, especially if they want to remain on budget. Modest, incremental steps over a long period seems much more money-conscious than NASA's money-devouring PR spectacles.

The overall-architecture as I envision would break down in basic five-year phases:

Year 1-5: building launch infrastructure
Year 6-10: launching unmanned satellites
Year 11-15: gearing up for manned spaceflight
Year 16-20: initiating manned spaceflight
Year 21-25: expanding overall space capabilities (space outpost and/or lunar mission)

PHASE THREE: BUILDING LAUNCH INFRASTRUCTURE. The next thing the ASA would have to do is build up an initial infrastructure. Establish a primary and secondary launch facility, create research laboratories, and so on. At least initially, they wouldn't have to rely exclusively on home-grown resources. A lot can be subcontracted from other countries for the initial stages while they slowly create their own manufacturing capabilities as the program progresses.

This is also the stage where they can borrow or lease or reverse-engineer a lot of existing designs used or abandoned by the other agencies. For instance, the DC-X, a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle that showed a lot of promise and was in the in-atmosphere test flight phase, was axed by NASA in 1999 because of budget squeezes. How hard would it be to re-create the research needed to make that (especially if they hire some of Talent that helped create it in the first place) or even just outrightly buy the plans and old vehicles from NASA itself? Or how about contracting the people who created SS1 to make similar vehicles for the ASA, or other X-prize contenders with promising desgns? Or why not just buy some old rockets, maybe even some old ICBMs, outright from the Russians or Chinese and reverse engineer what they need?

There are of course other possibilities, but the point is that up-and-coming space powers don't necessarily have to build and research everything from scratch like the old space agencies had to. There's a lot of space-access tech already floating around, and if an agency like our theoretical ASA has a good enough budget, all they would really have to do is shop around and they're already skipping up several rungs on the ladder into space.

Anyway, this post is long enough. I may or may not continue later on...

If nation X desires prestige for what X accomplishes, is it counterproductive to do it with American, Russian, etc. hardware and intellectual technology?