Generic Negative Frontlines

Transorbital Railroad Frontlines

Solvency
Private market advances are lowering launch costs now Smith, 11 [Zdenek Smith, Will lower cost rocket launches, announced by SpaceX, accelerate space exploration and development? TED Ideas Worth Spreading, 4/7/11, http://www.ted.com/conversations/1802/will_lower_cost_rocket_launche.html]
Today, Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX unveiled final specifications and launch date for the Falcon Heave, the world's largest rocket. When answering questions to reporters, he described his vision of producing rockets in a carmanufacturing like manner. Basically SpaceX is setting up a repeatable and efficient assembly of rockets. Elon believes that in the near future his company will produce and launch more rockets than the rest of the world combined. The price of each rocket launch will be several times lower than existing launches from other organizations. His estimates are based on SpaceX extensive experience and production cost of existing Falcon 9 rocket. According to SpaceX, "Falcon Heavy at approximately $1,000 per pound to orbit, sets a new world record in affordable spaceflight." Elon invisions that substantially lowering cost of sending equipment/people into space will lead to a new era of mankind in space exploration and space

development.

Lack of a market and government as primary buyer keep costs high Atlas, 11 [Atlas Aerospace, Industry news, Rising launch costs may hinder NASA missions, 4/06/11,
http://www.atlasaerospace.net/eng/newsi-r.htm?id=5411&printversion=1]

The skyrocketing launch costs are part of the NASA Launch Services contract signed last year. The NLS agreement with four companies, which follows up a similar expiring contract, covers rocket flight opportunities for NASA spacecraft over the next 10 years. A previous NLS contract expired last year and held
provisions for heavily discounted rocket costs due to projections of a more robust U.S. commercial launch services market when it was signed in 2000. "The expectation at that time was there was a large commercial market," Cline said. "That did not materialize. As opposed to government being a secondary customer buying on the margin, government became the primary customer." With government as the anchor customer, marginal launch costs for NASA and the Air Force are on the rise. "Rocket costs are going crazy and mostly up," said Steve Squyres, a respected planetary scientist and chair of a panel of researchers that issued recommendations in March for NASA to address the possibility of a declining budget matched against rising launch prices. Squyres led the National Research Council's planetary science decadal survey, an independent report ranking a slate of robotic solar system missions for the next 10 years.

Even with governmental subsidy, the cost remains too high Woodcock, 1 [Gordon Woodcock, Technological Barriers to Space Settlement National Space Society, Jan/Feb, 2001, http://www.nss.org/settlement/roadmap/technological.html#affordable]
Without high demand, the RLV business case does not close no matter how good the RLV's other attributes. Clearly, if space settlement were undertaken, traffic demand would be very large. However, without significant reduction in costs, a settlement program is seen as economically impossible. It's a "Catch-22."

Government-funded human exploration supported by RLVs would improve the business case, but probably not enough for private investment: A modest lunar base needs about 25 launches/year to support four lunar
trips per year. Mars exploration, assuming one trip per Mars opportunity, needs about 50 per year to put up enough equipment and propellant, and support orbital assembly operations. Other NASA demands are about 10 per year, and commercial communications, up to 20 per year. The projected total demand is about 100 launches/year, and the industry's revenue at NASA's target cost of $1,000/lb would be about $4 billion annually. That's actually a little less revenue than today. Investors and company boards will ask, "Why take high business risk if revenue doesn't grow even with success?"

Falcon 9 hasnt been certifiedNASA cant use it Atlas, 11 [Atlas Aerospace, Industry news, Rising launch costs may hinder NASA missions, 4/06/11,

http://www.atlasaerospace.net/eng/newsi-r.htm?id=5411&printversion=1] "Launch vehicle costs are high," Squyres said. "They're growing. They're growing in a somewhat volatile and unpreditable fashion. They're becoming an increasingly large fraction of the cost of planetary missions, which is a trend we view with some alarm." The NASA Launch Services contract includes the Atlas 5 rocket from ULA, Falcon launchers from SpaceX, the Orbital Sciences Corp. Pegasus XL and Taurus XL boosters, and the Athena rocket family from Lockheed Martin. Cline said the Falcon 9 rocket, while not as capable as the Atlas 5, is considerably less costly. But the Falcon 9 rocket, privately designed and tested by SpaceX, does not yet meet NASA's stringent certification standards for its most precious science missions.

NASA Advantage
NASA lacks funding and tech too old to solve Huetteman, 11 [Emmarie Huetteman, Washington Post, 1/24/11, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2011/01/24/AR2011012405139.html]
A 2005 report by the National Research Council sounded the alarm about the climate satellite system, declaring it was "at risk of collapse," largely because of weakening of U.S. financial support for such programs. The 2010 report by Lewis and others asserted that half of all climate satellites will have outlived their design life within the next eight years. NASA's earth science budget shrank from about $2 billion to $1.4 billion between 2000 and 2006, when the Bush administration's greater funding priority was space exploration. Several environment-related satellite missions were either cut or shelved: l The Global Precipitation Measurement mission, designed to replace the 13-year-old Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, was delayed from 2010 until at least 2012 during the Bush administration. President Obama's 2011 budget proposes a mid-2013 launch. l The Landsat series of Earth observation satellites, a nearly 40-year-old mission run by the U.S. Geological Survey, had its next satellite delayed from this year, with the latest plans estimating a 2012 launch. This mission watches rising sea levels, glacial movement and coral reef decline, and it charts environmental conditions for military and intelligence uses. But one of its two satellites is experiencing degraded image quality and the other has been up since 1984, far past its life expectancy.

No scientific support for global warming hypothesis Armstong 11 Professor @ U Wharton School J. Scott Armstrong, Professor of Marketing specializing in forecasting technology, 331-2011, Climate Change Policy Issues, CQ Congressional Testimony, Lexis

Global warming alarmists have used improper procedures and, most importantly, have violated the general scientific principles of objectivity and full disclosure. They also fail to correct errors or to cite relevant literature that reaches conclusion that are unfavorable. They also have been deleting information from Wikipedia that is unfavorable to the alarmists' viewpoint (e.g., my entry has been frequently revised by them). These departures from the scientific method are apparently intentional. Some alarmists claim that there is
no need for them to follow scientific principles. For example, the late Stanford University biology professor Stephen

Schneider said, "each of us has to decide what is the right balance between being effective and being honest." He also said "we have to offer up scary scenarios" (October 1989, Discover Magazine interview). Interestingly, Schneider had been a

ClimateGate also documented many violations of objectivity and full disclosure committed by some of the climate experts that were in one way or another associated with the IPCC. The alarmists' lack of interest in scientific forecasting procedures and the evidence from opinion polls (Pew Research Center 2008) have led us to conclude that global warming is a political movement in the U.S. and elsewhere (Klaus 2009). It is a product of advocacy, rather than of the scientific testing of multiple hypotheses.
leader in the 1970s movement to get the government to take action to prevent global cooling.

No impact to warming it has happened many times Korea Times 3/18 [2011, 'Global warming' happened more often than thought, accessed June 22, 2011,
Lexis Nexis, AJ] A recent study has proposed that cases of intense global

warming lasting tens of thousands of years have taken place more frequently throughout history than previously thought, reported the Science Daily Thursday. These events happened every 400,000 years during a warm period of Earth. 'The release of carbon dioxide detached in the deep
ocean was the most likely trigger of these ancient 'hyperthermal, or global warming, events,' said Richard Norris, a professor of geology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Most

of these events raised the average global temperatures between 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, which is similar to how much temperatures are expected to rise in coming decades as a consequence of global warming. Cant solve warming Hamilton 10 Professor of Public Ethics @ ANU Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics in Australia, 2010, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change, pg 27-28

even if we act promptly and resolutely, the world is on a path to reach 650 ppm is almost too frightening to accept. That level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will be associated with warming of about 4C by the end of the century, well above the temperature associated with tipping points that would trigger further warming.58 So it seems that even with the most optimistic set of assumptionsthe ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling by 3 per cent a year for a few decadeswe have no chance of preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that will spark uncontrollable climate change. The Earth's climate would enter a chaotic era lasting thousands of years before natural processes eventually establish some sort of equilibrium. Whether human beings would still be a force on the planet, or even survive, is a moot point. One thing seems certain: there will be far fewer of us. These conclusions arc alarming, co say the least, but they are not alarmist. Rather than choosing or interpreting numbers to make the situation appear
The conclusion that, worse than it could be, following Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows 1 have chosen numbers that err on the conservative side, which is to say numbers that reflect a more buoyant assessment of the possibilities. A more neutral assessment of how the global community is likely to respond would give an even bleaker assessment of our future. For example, the analysis

excludes non-CO2, emissions from aviation and shipping. Including them makes the task significantly harder, particularly as aviation emissions have been growing rapidly and are expected to continue to do so as there is no foreseeable alternative to severely restricting the number of flights.v' And any realistic assessment of the prospects for international agreement would

The last chance to reverse the trajectory of global emissions by 2020 was forfeited at the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009. As a consequence, a global
have global emissions peaking closer to 2030 rather than 2020. response proportionate to the problem was deferred for several years.

SPS
SPS not feasible Fan, et. al, 11 -William Fan (Chancellor at NC A&T State) Harold Martin (Curator of Search for the Obvious and a Senior Associate in Business Development at Acumen Fund), James Wu (senior mining analyst at Union Securities), Brian Mok, Executive Summary, Space Based Solar Power, Industy and Technology Assessment, 6/2/11,
http://www.pickar.caltech.edu/e103/Final%20Exams/Space%20Based%20Solar%20Power.pdf.) In this report, we introduce some of the technological aspects of SBSP. However, we will be focusing on laying down the economic groundwork for SBSP. We obtain linearized trend data for various factors that affect the marginal cost of SBSP (primarily solar panel efficiency, orbital transport costs, and energy demand and cost). We determined that it is actually infeasible to begin work on SBSP, as the marginal costs do not provide an adequate annual return for us to recommend SBSP. Unfortunately, we determined that large capital and R&D costs are required for SBSP to occur, further decreasing the likelihood of SBSP from being large scale feasible . Without dramatic disruptive technology or large, governmental investments, SBSP will not be feasible as a mainstream source of energy

until at least 2040.

No solvency solar flames deter successful space based satellites Hemanth 6/21 [2011, **CS Hemanth is a writer and reporter on US space policy and problems from India,
Theres a possibility solar flares may disrupt satellites, power supply, Google News, DNA: Daily News and Analysis, http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_theres-a-possibility-solar-flares-may-disrupt-satellites-powersupply_1557294, accessed June 21, 2011, AJ] this period, a

The Sun is set to emerge from a relatively low period of activity and is expected to reach its peak in 2013 and 2014. During

threat looms large over Earth as it could be pounded by devastating solar storms that astrophysicists term as category five or X-class solar storms. Astrophysicist Professor RC Kapoor,
to worry. The

formerly with the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), said that though there is the risk of Earth being hit by X-class solar storms, human beings would not be affected. High solar activity has been occurring since time immemorial, but there have been no instances of affecting human beings. Even if solar flares are directed towards Earth, there is no reason

Earths greatest protector is its atmosphere and magnetic fields. The flares would get trapped in the magnetic fields, he said. However, there is a possibility of solar storms disrupting satellites and power supply stations, warned Prof Kapoor. There will be some disturbances in communication as there is a possibility of satellites being hit by category five storms. If that occurs, there will be short-circuiting in
year before its original mission duration. Dipankar Banerjee, associate professor at IIA, said if

satellites, on which our communication, TV and defence systems depend on. To avoid such a situation, space agencies will have to change the orientation of satellites. Similarly, electric grids will have to be protected, he said. Incidentally, Indias maiden moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, was a victim of solar radiation. Chandrayaan-1s mission was aborted almost a

the solar flares are too strong and if they manage to penetrate the atmosphere, people living close to the North and South Poles could be affected. It is difficult to say what type of flares AND, ITAR blocks the development of space-based solar power

Space Politics 9 [April 1, 2009, **Space Policy is a website that contributes by informing about current news in
the world of space, Shermans march towards ITAR reform, Google, http://www.spacepolitics.com/2009/04/01/shermans-march-towards-itar-reform/, accessed June 27, 2011, AJ] The chairman of the subcommittee, Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA), discussed his plans during a special

appearance during a panel on ITAR at the Satellite 2009 conference in Washington last week. He said Thursdays

hearing was the first in a series of hearings on substantive export control issues, with a focus first and foremost on satellites. Recently the space industry has made credible arguments that ITAR controls have hurt their business and have hurt our space industrial base significantly, he said. That claim is echoed at least in privateby some in the intelligence community, who claim they find it more and more difficult to source satellite-related components domestically. Technical problems, expenses, and obstacles mean that solar powered satellites will fail Hadhazy, 1AC Author, 9 [April 16, 2009, **Adam Hadhazy is a writer on green technology and initiatives
that studies environmental science, Will Space-Based Solar Power Finally See the Light of Day?, Google, The Scientific American, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=will-space-based-solar-power-finally-see-the-light-of-day, accessed June 25, 2011, AJ] Dangers and engineering challenges abound, however: Space

junk like that which recently threatened the International Space Station, for example, could collide with the skeletal space solar satellite during assembly. And keeping the satellite's huge beam and the distant rectenna reliably synced up also stands as an unsolved technical issue, says CSP's Little. Overall, the how may be much easier to overcome than the how much. "Technically, we're a lot closer to space-based solar power than we are economically," Little says. The biggest obstacle, he says, continues to be launch costs. "Large structures in space are not showstoppers, but the cost of getting up into space is the real hang-up [for SBSP]," CSP's Best says. In Space Energy's business plan, for instance, half of the $250 million allotted for their communication satellitesize prototype goes toward just lofting the approximately 1,760-pound (800kilogram) craft into orbit. Many other obstacles stand in the way of commercially viable SBSP. A crucial regulatory matter: getting clearance from the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) that allocates use of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Competitiveness
The transorbital railroad will undercut costsdecreases incentives for innovation Hobby Space, 10 [Hobby Space, 10/13/10, http://hobbyspace.com/nucleus/?itemid=24325]
The Mars Society has posted Robert Zubrin's op-ed in Space News this week in which he lays out his Transorbital Railroad to space concept: "Transorbital Railroad" Proposed - The Mars Society. Basically he takes the commercial launch services approach to the max. NASA would buy medium and heavy launch vehicle services in bulk from commercial companies and provide the payload space to private and public users at heavily discounted prices. He suggests rates that work out to $100/kg to LEO. The annual cost of 6 MLV and 6 HLV launches would actually be less than what the annual Shuttle budget has been. Launched on a fixed schedule, routine low cost access to space would encourage a wide range of new users and applications. It sounds like a pretty good idea to me, though there would need to be some tweaking of the details. For example, say one of the suborbital space transport companies develops a second generation two stage orbital system that can profitably place a small payload, e.g. a ton, into orbit at $500/kg. That is, "profitably" if it has a sufficient

market. If

the Transorbital Railroad is undercutting that price and taking away all the customers, it would stifle such technical innovation. So there should be some modification of the plan so that small launch
vehicles and, in general, new technical approaches are not inadvertently discouraged.

Alternative cause to collapseUS lacks aerospace workers IFPA 9, Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis (A Space and Security, A Net Assessment, January, http://www.ifpa.org/pdf/Space_and_U_S_Security_Net_Assessment_Final_Dec15_08. pdf)
If current trends continue, the

United States will not have the specialized workforce necessary to support future U.S. primacy in space. Indeed, there is a major crisis in the aerospace industry, both in terms of sustaining the current workforce and developing the workforce of the future. With the reductions in
defense spending that followed the end of the Cold War, the United States lost over 600,000 scientific and technical aerospace jobs.68 According to the Aerospace Industries Association, total industry employment went from 1,120,800 in 1990 down to 637,300 in 2007. In the space sector alone, employment slipped from 168,500 to 75,200 over the same period of time. Of the employees that remained following the initial post-Cold War cuts, it is suggested that 27 percent of Americas aerospace technical workforce is now eligible for retirement. This is simply the continuation of a wave of retirements that began some time ago70 The Aerospace Industries Association contends that nearly 60 percent of the U.S.-aerospace workforce was at least 45 years old in 2007. What is significant is that because many began their careers relatively young, a large number will be eligible for retirement in the next decade. Clearly, the workforce that supported U.S. space primacy during and immediately following the Cold War will need to be

replenished with the infusion of new talent. The ability of the United States to fill the void left by retirements is in question. Currently, the portion of those workers 34 or younger has declined from 32 percent in 1992 to 16 percent in 2003. About 70,000 students each year receive undergraduate degrees in
engineering in the United States. Subtracting the 15,000 degrees in non-space related engineering fields (civil, automotive, mining and transportation engineers) about 55,000 graduates are qualified for aerospace work. Of those,

approximately 20 percent are international students who are expected to return home upon graduation. That leaves about 44,000 graduates per year for all American companies, not only aerospace firms. Given that a single leading aerospace company expects to hire 50,000 engineers in the next five years, the challenge of replenishing the aerospace workforce becomes a challenge. It is
compounded by the fact that fewer students are earning degrees in math and sciencefrom undergraduate to doctorate while at the same time, there is an ongoing shortage of math and science teachers.

Competitiveness is resilient and collapse would be slow. Engardio 8 International senior writer for BusinessWeek, Paul, Is U.S. Innovation Headed Offshore?, Business Week, 5-7, http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/may2008/id2008057_518979.h tm
Apparently not, according to a new study published by the National Academies, the Washington organization that advises the U.S. government on science and technology policy. The 371-page report titled Innovation in Global Industries argues that, in sectors from software and semiconductors to biotech and logistics, America's lead in creating

new products and services has remained remarkably resilient over the past decadeeven as more research and development by U.S. companies is done offshore . "This is a good sign," says Georgetown
University Associate Strategy Professor Jeffrey T. Macher, who co-edited the study with David C. Mowery of the University of California at Berkeley. "It means most of the value added is going to U.S. firms, and they are able to reinvest those profits in innovation." The report, a collection of papers by leading academics assessing the impact of globalization on inventive activity in 10 industries, won't reassure all skeptics that the globalization of production and R&D is good for the U.S. One drawback is that most of the conclusions are based on old data: In some cases the most recent numbers are from 2002. Exporting the Benefits? And while the authors of the report make compelling cases that U.S. companies are doing just fine, thank you, none of the writers addresses today's burning question: Is American tech supremacy thanks to heavy investments in R&D also benefiting U.S. workers? Or are U.S. inventions mainly creating jobs overseas? A few years ago, most people took it for granted that what was good for companies was good for the greater economy. But the flat growth in living standards for most Americans during the last boom has raised doubts over the benefits of globalization. "Innovation shouldn't be an end in itself for U.S. policy," says trade theorist Ralph E. Gomory, a research professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. "I think we have to address whether a country can run on innovation. If you just do R&D to enhance economic activity in other countries, you are getting very little out of it." Gomory, a former top IBM (IBM) executive, retired in 2007 as president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funded the National Academies study.

Still, given all the debate over offshoring, the report's central findings are interesting. The authors marshal a wealth of evidence to show that, thanks to innovation, globalization hasn't eroded U.S. leadership even in some

industries where there has been a substantial offshore shift in engineering and design. Despite an explosion of outsourcing to India and Ireland, for example, America's software industry still trumps the rest of the world in exports of packaged software and services, patent activity, and venture capital investment. The U.S. also accounts for 90% of chip-design patentsthe same level as 1991although Asian companies now do most of manufacturing. And when it comes to biotechnology, the U.S. is way ahead, luring more venture capital than all other countries combined.
America First The U.S. even remains a heavyweight in personal computers, the study says, though China and Taiwan manufacture most of the hardware. That's because the real innovation and profits still belong to companies

like Microsoft (MSFT) and Intel (INTC), makers of the operating system and central processors, while U.S. brands command 40% of the global market and still define breakthrough design. There are
cases where the U.S. can lose a commanding lead when domestic manufacturing disappearsnamely in flat-panel displays and lighting. Macher also concedes "there are problems on the horizon" regarding America's future competitiveness. Other nations are starting to mimic many of the strategies that give the U.S. an innovation edge, for example. And as Asians grow richer "they are becoming more sophisticated and demanding than Americans as users of many tech products." But for

now, "all evidence is that our position in many of these industries will continue," says Macher. Why is the U.S. so entrenched? One reason, he says, is simply that U.S. corporations are proving very adept at managing global R&D networks while keeping core innovation at home. While innovative activity in chips and software is growing fast elsewhere, it has not yet been enough to close the gap with the U.S. The fact that the U.S. remains by far the world's most lucrative market for pharmaceuticals and business software helps explain its continued strength in those industries. What's more, industry clusters involving companies, universities, and venture capital are so well-establishedsuch as San Diego and Cambridge, Mass., in biotechthat it will take many years for other nations to replicate them.

Hegemony is inevitable, doesnt solve anything, and competitiveness isnt key. Salam 9 Policy advisor at e21: Economic Policies for the 21st Century, and is a fellow at the New America Foundation, Reihan, Robert Pape Is Overheated, The American Scene, 1/21, http://theamericanscene.com/2009/01/21/robert-pape-isoverheated
Consider the extraordinary and unprecedented steps the Bush administration took over the last eight years in the international arena, and then consider how weak the soft balancing has been in response, not least from the Chinese. This is hardly an endorsement of a hyperactive foreign policy, but it is at least
worthy of note. Wohlforth and Brooks have found Papes soft balancing thesis wanting, which could account for the fact that Pape dismisses them so readily, but they are hardly alone in this regard. Some will point to Russias conflict with Georgia to suggest that the kind of structural unipolarity Wohlforth and Brooks describe is a dead letter, which is a little strange: unipolarity and omnipotence arent the same thing, a point both have emphasized. In an essay for Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington introduced the slightly confusing idea of uni-multipolarity to account for soft balancing. In my view, this introduced unnecessary conceptual confusion, but it is worth keeping in mind that unipolarity does not mean that if America wills it, it shall be done. Pape spends a lot of time demonstrating that U.S. economic output represents a declining share of global output, which is hardly a

surprise. Yet as Pape surely understands, the more relevant question is how much and how readily can economic output be translated into military power? The European Union, for example, has many state-like features, yet it doesnt have the advantages of a traditional state when it comes to raising an army. The Indian economy is taxed in a highly uneven manner, and much of the economy is black the same is true across the developing world. As for China, both the shape of the economy, as Yasheng Huang suggests, and its long frontiers, as Andrew Nathan has long argued, pose serious barriers to translating potential power into effective power . (Wohlforth and Brooks give
Stephen Walts balance-of-threat its due.) So while this hardly obviates the broader point that relative American economic power is eroding that was the whole idea of Americas postwar grand strategy it is worth keeping in mind. This is part of the reason why sclerotic, statist economies can punch above their weight militarily, at least for a time they are better at marshaling resources. Over the long run, the Singapores will beat the Soviets. But in the long run, were all dead. And given that this literature is rooted in the bogey of long-term coalition warfare, you can see why the unipolarity argument holds water. At the risk of sounding overly harsh, Papes understanding of innovativeness based on the number of patents filed, it seems is crude to say the least. I recommend Amar Bhids brilliant critique of Richard Freeman, which Ill be talking about a lot. Pape cites Zakaria, who was relying on slightly shopworn ideas that Bhid demolishes in The Venturesome Economy. The global diffusion of technology is real, and if

anything it magnifies U.S. economic power. Ah, but were talking about the prospect of coalition

warfare! The global diffusion of technology is indeed sharply raising the costs of military conquest, as the United States discovered in Iraq. The declining utility of military power means that a unipolar distribution of military power is more likely to persist. And yes, it also means that unipolar military power is less valuable than it was in 1945.