Alternative Space Flight Concepts - now what the hell is that about ? Health food for astronauts ? Ride your bike to Mars ? Meditate your way through the universe ? Hardly .....

We are a private Non-Profit organisation of space flight enthusiasts and we have developed some space ideas of our own, some admittedly quite provoking. We do support space travel including manned missions. However, one can hardly ignore that none of the "big dreams" of the early space and rocket pioneers have become true - and they probably won't ever - the way things go currently. The sad state of space exploration is hardly due to a lack of interest in the general public. Rather the opposite is true: the space flight interest and science fiction community has never been more numerous. Science fiction movies like Stargate, reality fiction like Contact and docu-dramas like Apollo 13 all were block busters. More than 100,000,000 people all over the globe have visited the Pathfinder Mission web sites. Does that sound to you like "lack of interest"? Is there perhaps not enough money? The truth is Europe spends several billion US-$ each year on space exploration. More than on any other scientific or research project. Same in the US. Only all that money didn't get us very FAR - in the true sense of the word.

We can no longer ignore space exploration is in a serious mental crisis

Space travel. The German word is Weltraumfahrt. It means that there is a space with worlds in it. And we can travel that space to visit those worlds. This is how it all began - Oberth, von Braun, Goddhard and many other pioneers - they all wanted to travel to the planets. Instead all we see since 20 years is missions where people circle the earth, sit on a bike ergometer and take each other's blood pressure. Science without a purpose? Seems the only purpose is self-satisfaction. Medical experiments make 60% of all Shuttle experiments. Let me assure you that within the medical community literally nobody is interested. Never (!) have I read a single article in the German Medical Journal (Ärzteblatt) about medical space research (and I receive it since 15 years). Sometimes they tell us those experiments are a necessary prerequisite for long term missions, such as to Mars. Right or wrong - do we have a decision to fly to Mars? If not, than that's what should come first - at least in a logical decision chain. If we have that decision, then we can look into our more specific needs.

It is my impression, however, that there are no long-term goals or concepts. In fact it seems there are no concepts at all. A decision to land on the moon is a very specific goal. In a public discussion such a goal has the advantage that every one can take sides - you can be in favour or against it. With current missions, however, most people don't even know what they are all about.

And why don't we have such goals?

Space travel is too expensive.

Nobody really dares to publicly, that is, at the political decision level, suggest that we should spend 500 billion US-$ for a Mars landing mission. But what about 10 billion - spent over a 10 year period? Would that work?

Cost of space exploration - this is a never-dying public discussion since the Apollo moon landings. Space advocats react swiftly - they tell us that our societies spend much more on a per capita basis for opera visits, for cigaretts or for potatoe chips. True, but one hasn't anything to do with the other. Or they tell us that in other areas of public spending much higher amounts of money are wasted. True again, but that's the worst argument of all as it is the opposite of a justification. Rather, an admission of guilt. In any case - the actual challenge is not met.

The truth is that our societies spend much more on space exploration than on any other area of science or research. Why aren't we honest about it - if we were to divert those funds to cancer research, to fusion technology etc. it would be much better spent - both under commercial and ethical aspects.

Cheap or expensive - this is never an objective verdict. Rather, the question should be if we feel we get our money's worth. If yes, then we are usually ready to spend more. Is 100 billion US-$ for spent for landing on the moon cheap or expensive. 20.000.000 $ for a half year (or so) on MIR is really pocket money. But 900.000.000 DM for a 2 week D2 mission? I say we do not get our money's worth. This has several reasons. One is the high cost of space access also adversly affecting payload cost because technicians want to squeeze every kilo out ouf a payload. For years they have tried to make us believe this is how it must be, because rockets are such complex machines.

Must launch cost be so expensive ?

We believe not. Neither does a growing number of interest groups worldwide. We can try to assess - on the basis of physics and current technology of course - how cheap or expensive space access could be. We find a savings potential of 90% and higher as compared to today's cost. Those aren't lay-man's pocket calculator results - it is the bottom line of several internal US Air Force reports, not one single report but many since 1961 (last one dated 1994 !).

Space industry managers are also beginning to feel that launch cost is beginning to become a true obstacle to any real progress in space. There answer is (for obvious reasons) more technical optimising, more efficient systems, more detail work on engines, turbo pumps etc. and - of course - more money. But that is exactly wrong. Space travel is not aviation where high flight frequencies justify expensive improvements of details. Any attempt to try and save 10% or so is totally worthless from the start as this is fully in the range of today's typical project cost overruns. Rather, we must change our concepts drastically.

There is an alternative choice worth exploring - simple launch systems, rockets using simple technology and low-grade optimization. This is the result that research groups working for the US Air Force came up with as early as 1961. The reports were then kept secret. It was not before 1968 that the results of those reports, the so-called MCD (Minimal Cost Design) criteria were first published. A number of test motors were built - at incredibly low cost and under truely unbelieveble circumstances. It wasn't just anybody, it was Boeing, TRW and all the other big one's with a name in the aerospace industry. There was a real craze about cheap rockets. Shortly thereafter the US decided to build the Shuttle, which dominates US space activities (or rather, lack of activity) until today. There were probably two reasons to suppress the MCD results. One was the threat to the aerospace community to loose some very lucrative contracts. Second, it may have been that the Pentagon did not want to permit a proliferation of rocket technology into a group of nations of "moderate means" and limited technological capabilities, but "with ambitions". It's too late for that now: Iran, Irak, North Korea, Pakistan, India, Israel, Egypt and probably many others have rocket programs under way nowadays.

For us "space enthusiasts" it doesn't make sense to constantly evade the argument "too expensive" and instead draw comparisons with our societies' consumption of potatoe chips, expenditure for dog food, subsidies for opera and theaters etc. All these comparisons may be correct, but they bear no relation with space travel whatsoever. Either we say cost is not too high and there is no other way to get up there and all in all the money is well-spent (my guess is you will end up an endangered species with that oppinion), or we take on the challenge and say Yes, right, we have to bring the cost down and this is how we do it ....

Honestly, landing on the moon for 100 Billion US-$ (in today's money) - could we have done that too, that is, we Germans, the French or the British? From a technical standpoint, I think the answer is definitely Yes - with that money in the back (we would have never taken the decision, though, that is probably uniquely American). To put a program together with just 10 Billion US-$, or perhaps just 5 - that's a task! Is the best way to Mars via an 80 Billion $ space station?

Sometimes it seems prudent to take one step back to get a better view of the picture as a hole. Somtimes it becomes necessary to re-think our goals and the best path to reach them.

What's all this nagging around ? ....

Anybody can criticise anything today. We may be doing that where necessary, but we want to make productive contributions, too:

• On the PR front

We want to introduce alternative programs to the public, want to present clever new ideas and explain concepts which elsewhere don't really get a fair chance. For ex. Robert Zubrin's Mars flight concept - it's really clever and well-designed and would cost only 5 - 10% of NASA's Mars projects. Yet, until recently, they were almost unheard-off in the German public.

• by advancing knowledge

only with a solid knowledge base one can take sound decisions. We want to increase the knowledge of rocketry and space-related technologies. Otherwise, we will have only low-subsance discussions on the "Däneken"-level.

• via practical work

We hold some patents, applications and design patents in the arena of Hybrid Rockets. Hybrids are a real hot development. They are powerful, environmentally safe, of simple construction (and hence cheap) and - most important of all - they cannot explode! Sounds too good to be true? Our concepts have been evaluated by competent parties and have been rated highly interesting. Despite this, we don't receive any offiicial money and hence our efforts are moderate, at best. But we felt anything is better than doing nothing. And so here we go! And we look for folks to join us. People with a hands-on mentality, which somehow seems to have gotten lost in our societies. People with a sound knowledge of Math, Physics, Chemistry, but also those who can weld two sheets of metal together, mill, laminate or turn a lathe. Could that be you ?

• via public discussion

Tell us what you think. We will also be glad to answer your questions, those of general interest and those which are a bit more specialized. Anything you always wanted to know about space but never dared to ask.