"NASA has the ability to create a market in about 30 months by agreeing to purchase a significant amount of cargo services from private companies," said Michael Kearney, president and CEP of SpaceHab, Inc., a company that supplies laboratory modules for space shuttle missions. "The agency should solicit fixed price bids to take cargo to and from the International Space Station."
Using private companies to for at least some ISS cargo missions, instead of relying on Russian Progress and space shuttle missions, NASA could open up additional room for ISS construction materials and shave at least a few of the remaining shuttle missions off the launch schedule, he added.
Kearney and others spoke Thursday before the President's Commission on the Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy, which is conducting a series of information-gathering hearings on how to best follow through with President George W. Bush's space vision of renewing the human exploration of space. The hearings were held at the Georgia Centers for Advanced Telecommunications Technology at Georgia Institute of Technology.
"I think the economics and commercial aspects of this space vision are going to be very important on its value," said commission chairman Edward "Pete" Aldridge, Jr.
Long-term sustainability
Space industry investor Stephen Fleming, of EGL Ventures, told commissioners that while NASA's exploration ambitions to other planets are laudable, they don't leave much room for long-term sustainability.
"Flags and footprints make lousy business plan," Fleming said. "Profitable industries are sustainable, government industries are not."
Fleming told the commission that the first step to a space industry is lowering launch costs, which NASA can do by committing to launches run by private companies and relinquishing design control on launch vehicles. The only thing NASA should provide is the payload and a check for services rendered, he added.
"I don't want another space program, I want a new space industry," Fleming said of the new space vision.
Some commissioners expressed concern over the need to press NASA's vision of exploration into a profitable venture.
"It's not that we're going to do this to make spaceflight cheap," said commissioner Paul Spudis, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, adding that flags and footprints on other worlds stimulate more than just investor pocketbooks. "If you create a system where you can learn new skills and new technologies to live and work in space, then that's valuable."
Commissioner Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, said he feels the President's space vision should "ride even higher than the possibility that it can be spun off as an industry."
Keeping public interest
Marco Caceres, a senior analyst and director of space studies for the Teal Group consulting firm, said that NASA should not sell its space vision as a moon-Mars package, but instead highlight them both as two separate missions. Only then will the agency be able to sustain public interest over the 30 years needed to reach Mars.
"Sending a manned mission to the moon by itself is not particularly sexy since we've already been there and done that," Caceres said. "But it is easier than holding the public's attention for three decades and at least eight presidential terms."
The Thursday hearings were part of a two-day long session, the third of five planned for the commission. Future hearings are scheduled in upcoming months for San Francisco and New York City, before the commission reports back to President Bush in June.
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