The Laughing Wolf

The U.S. Space Force

Over at the Winds of Change, blogfather Joe Katzman has a very good piece up on the transition of the U.S. Air Force to the Air and Space Force. Anyone interested in space needs to read the actual document and the excellent stories listed about it.

A key factor is, as noted in my other space story today, getting off this mudball and into orbit. That is the key to doing anything, and it is the area where the most improvement is needed. A NASA launch takes months, or even years to plan. Defense and commercial applications need to go right now. What they need is something almost like an airline schedule, and NASA has nothing that can or will meet that goal. This is a hot issue, and I have taken part in some frank and extremely informal discussions on this very subject with members of DoD, who were not shy about expressing their opinion of same.

I also wish I could have been at another, more formal, meeting in which DoD and NASA discussed some research of mutual interest. DoD was looking to get it done within about five years. NASA was talking at least a 15-year program that could run out longer. The descriptor of the DoD faces I got was priceless.

DoD research tends to be based on more immediate needs and manufacturing cycles. NASA research is based off academic research, in which careers can be expended on essentially one major experiment. Academics tend to think in 20- to 30-year cycles based off tenure, funding, etc. That difference does cause a lot of problems when commercial, defense, and academic cultures meet. It is also a large factor in the problems NASA has with real space commercialization.

On the other hand, I believe that XCOR, Scaled Composites, and some other companies competing in the X-Prize might just want to read this document and start pitching their wares to a big potential customer. One hopes, at any rate, that the Air Force will look commercial and off-the-shelf for such an important challenge.

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