In an article in this week’s Space Review Eric R. Hedman writes about many of the New Space companies that are proposing transportation systems that should vastly change the current status quo for space access, and wonders whether or not many of the New Space company’s are asking the tough questions. Along with SpaceX, SpaceDev, and t/Space, Eric specificaly mentions Masten Space Systems so we decided to respond with some of the tough answers.

In many cases the answers are proprietary but, as those who have been following discussions here and on my personal blog (Selenian Boondocks) know, we’ve been trying to be a fairly open company. The answers to many of the tough questions were answered for us by the DC-X. The DC-X program proved that a suborbital VTVL RLV could fly and that it could be designed for very cheap operations (ie. requring only a little permanent ground equipment and a small support crew). The fact that the DC-X was substantially bigger than our XA-1.0 vehicle (and about the same rough size as our proposed XA-2.0 vehicle), and used a much harder to handle fuel (LH2 vs Isopropyl Alcohol), leads us to believe that the infrastructure and operations requirements for our systems shouldn’t be any more onerous than what they demonstrated, and should in fact be substantially easier.

As we scale up to orbital systems, a few of those questions that Eric asks are valid concerns (as well as many that he didn’t ask). One of the ways we’re trying to deal with those unknowns is through an engineering and flight testing processes that allows us to answer some of the harder questions (TPS is one example) in an iterative manner as we progress through our test/build cycle. While admittedly that means we can’t state up front with as much “certainty” what the associated development and operational costs of proposed systems will be, we do have plans in place for answering those questions as we move along through our development process. Each subsequent test vehicle between 0.1 and 2.0 adds a system to solve a problem. That doesn’t mean its easy, though. If it were easy we would all be living in space already. But what it does mean is that we have answers or are in the process of answering all of the questions Eric raised (and a whole lot more), and so far they are all looking good.

[Note: if you happen to be an accreditted investor, and want to ask us some of those tough questions, Michael can probably provide you with more specifics on what we have done, and what our future plans are to remove those pieces of technical, market, and regulatory risks, including how we plan to deal with third party insurance costs.]

[Second Note: Clark Lindsey has also posted a good reply to Eric's article over on Space Transport News]