Whither Skylon and "new space"?

Confession - I'm as old space as can be. Much that beckons isn't. Especially Skylon. Let's do a quick "reality check" to "calibrate" where all of this is, where it can go, what holds it back, and where things likely will end up.

Was a NASA intern watching Shuttle "glass" tile tests (they glowed white hot on the inside for fraction of an hour while outside was just warm), programmed in HAL/S ("S" for Shuttle), acquired a telescope mount from a famous Shuttle scientist/engineer who redirected in the late 1970's into exoplanets, analyzed the mathematics of turbulent flow in hydrolox engines and hypersonic energy management, and more (was at the Shuttle ALT flight tests at the then Dryden Flight Research Center). Knew all the benefits, trade-offs, and failures of all the launch systems (family "business" relationships).

Shuttle was to be the culmination of NASA's ambitions - a "space pickup truck" with weekly, cost affordable use. It was supposed to be a "no holds barred" means to achieve that, and it was a magnificent achievement. It was compromised because it was too much, too fast, and too costly for a country on the edge of war and recession (like now).

(Which is why BTW I don't trust "Artemis" and wish it cancelled. Because it's not to be trusted. At all.)

Routinely landing and reusing boosters is the best example of "new space" we see that nearly matches Shuttle's ambitions (kudo's to SpaceX - SuperHeavy and StarShip will likely far exceed the Shuttle by going beyond LEO monthly). Soon to launch is the third launch of a clustered reusable booster than allows a 3x payload of the Shuttle to LEO, for 1/4 the cost of a launch - Falcon Heavy. (Note - a perfect platform for an affordable lunar program - yet it is being regarded poorly in that. Thank you Robert Zubrin.)

I could list a few dozen more here like these, but the point is not to chronicle them, but to understand them in context of business, created industry, and investment return potential. I'll use Skylon as an example.

Skylon is in many ways closely like an cold war spy story - the Lockheed D-21 hypersonic drone program, which used a unique propulsion system to intrusively gather intelligence outrunning missile defenses at Mach 3.3, then jettison it's data product for retrieval, and self-destruct. Skylon advances this aggressively to the point of Mach 5.5, where like a F9/FH, a second stage can be used to orbit a payload. Done by compressing the stagnation accumulated atmospheric oxygen it flies through, obviating the need for much oxidizer to be carried. The SABRE (Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine) multi-mode propulsion system that does this is in testing phase.

Likely a high speed jet transport is the next step for this, moving from fantasy through speculation to feasible reality. Which is a remarkable achievement that many (me as well) didn't believe possible.

A lot of "new space" is like this. And they are complicated to finance, turn into a business, and extract a persistent value/advantage from. Even SpaceX's brilliant accomplishment isn't considered a permanent success by the aerospace industry, even though it's forced considerable financial restructuring (Proton) and crisis (lower floor for commercial launch bids) - rivals just compensate by getting more help from government and trimming vehicle costs (see Ariane 6 and Vulcan).

Skylon's advances haven't met with increased financial support, just like SpaceX lost influence with it's amazingly advancing follow-on to Falcon being used by the USAF to denigrate it's LSA bid, resulting in a very detailed lawsuit filing.

Here's it in a nutshell - "old space" was all about getting dependable, low frequency of launch capability to serve a tiny but significant need. Once that was "solved", it was to be packaged up neatly and compartmentalized - end of story. That way, the same huge cost it accumulated to become used, would set a barrier to rivals. Competing lunar and Shuttle caused the Soviet Union into bankruptcy in a few decades. Even China has been circumspect in funding space for a similar concern.

When "new space" turns this on it's ear, it creates both business and strategic issues. Every nation, and even non-state actors can lob things, even explosive things, across the globe. Space therefore can be openly weaponized easily, among other things.

And investors can't tell easily what to back, what they'll get, and how long it will take to get anything back. They are used to "hearing the music" of how business comes together and "plays" into an economic "symphony" - yet almost all doing these amazing businesses are necessarily "tone deaf", deeply obsessed with considerable accomplishment to even begin to field such as a beginning or "bootstrap". Investors gauge things both tangible/intangible, subjective/objective, and make "gut level" decisions on what will actually happen. Quantitative matters, but isn't the deciding factor, because many things intervene.

Back to Skylon - the winning aspect is not space, but that of the potential for economical hypersonic air transport.

Which isn't "new space".

Lets say for the moment it "wins". What about space launch business with it? It would be competing with Rocket Labs (and a few others soon) on "small sat" launches, using aircraft operations costing/logistics (how many use liquid hydrogen?) - a crowded field, but with a reuse advantage.

How about competing with Falcon/New Glenn reusable boosters? While Elon Musk made it a goal to have "gas n go" launches with daily cadence, the reality is that of 3-4 launches per booster, and a cadence of bimonthly. So the reuse isn't nearing that 10x/daily ambition anytime soon. The presumption of Skylon scaling up to meet this in payload, launch frequency, and cadence isn't anything but a long stretch, because they all face the same issues of the cost of extreme environment reuse (an expendable only needs to "survive" one-way, once).

What about the market for payloads to be launched? It's already in decline, about to face it's first "launch desert" - potentially a period where no launches at all might occur (no recurring revenue). At a time when four countries are about to field as many as 18 launch vehicles that they will subsidize launches on (they need strategic capability for national needs). Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are (or will soon) be "self-subsidizing" with launches of own constellations. And while in the past, the US government subsidized launch operations at the infrequently used "Western Range" of Vandenberg, even SpaceX isn't receiving enough interest to maintain it's facilities/staff there, after demonstrating/winning multiple national security launches - it's a very closed market to political favorites of Boeing/Lockheed/ULA.

So what really is "new space" about? Created industry. What's that? Things that weren't here before with "old space". Largely it's exploiting things too many/small/large/specialized/common/distant/close to be done then. What's that mean?

Most obvious is constellations - they are many/small/common/close. So it's unsurprising that OneWeb/SpaceX/Blue Origin all are doing this, while "old space" bleats about the past failures of Iridium/SkyNet constellations (which were tiny, less than a hundred). Side note - Iridium NG up and operational, doing well. Cheap, frequent launch is a requirement for constellations - we now can have that.

"Old space" then carps about how few constellations are needed. But ... the ones being mooted now amount to hundreds of constellations? Perhaps ... because "needed" and "desired" are vastly different than "old space" bothered to consider? Could it be that the "reductionist" mindset of minimal, reliable launch capability they perfected narrowly addresses payload classes, missions, and applications in the same way? And that "builds in" an inflexible demand curve that acts to circularly limit market growth?

It appears that's what we're testing at the moment. In short, market growth and industry scope are locked by "old space" existence. As long as they exist and are subsidized by America, Europe, Russian, China, India and others ... any "new space" business that perturbs this is at risk. Because the subsidies allow "old space" to out wait high launch frequency, waiting for it to collapse. Which is why Skylon futures don't depend on space launch.

It takes up too much here to describe more "created industry" - because I'd have to deal with "old space" rebuttals. Suffice to say there's a 100x more unspoken here. It is the key however to what the investor in "new space" really wants - "investment return potential".

So why "potential"? Because ... anyone investing in space is doing so for the long term and can only accept it as a "potential" (which means they can recover any losses by "selling" that potential to another equally minded investor, possibly at a discount). You'd be surprised how many space entrepreneurs completely miss this point. And how investors who have "old space" "experts" (yes, me too) can lose the significance here.

Skylon's long been sold on this "potential" - in this case, that you could almost "fly into space" - which is why they're still around. From a modernized form of something from the 1960's. Or, in SpaceX's case, the reused Saturn V booster that became the Shuttle program - done for cost and flight frequency, as has been delivered already by Falcon. Demonstrated potential with a enduring advantage - even if it hasn't fully delivered.

A visitor remarked to me yesterday that he undervalued Microsoft's "good enough" threshold for product, that made them a powerhouse from nothing.

"New space" - sell your investor's on the big vision, but chart the clear, concise path to "good enough" after MVP, before your rivals can. Do that, and you'll have a future.

Then you can last long enough to "win".