NASA to Announce New Commercial Space Partner

NewScientist is reporting that NASA has kicked their previous space partner, Rocketplane Kistler, to the curb and is in search of a new commercial space partner. The new partnership will try to develop a new shuttle to service the International Space Station. "The GAO's decision clears the way for NASA to select a new COTS partner in addition to SpaceX, whose partnership with NASA continues. Only $32 million was paid to Rocketplane Kistler, leaving $175 million for new partnerships."

Rocketplane?

[jpedlow]

So what is it that the company who got kicked out did? The link didnt work for me:( It seems though that if they just burned through $30M, maybe they should be held accountable for paying some of it back... I'm not 100% sure how things work in the states (I'm Canadian Eh), but shouldnt there be some form of performance rendered from this "partner", or is it just NASA sending money in this company's direction hoping from some sort of result? Maybe there should be more nerds doing open-source aerospace....or it could be a new field for google to go into ;)

Why contract it out?

[daveodukeo]

Why in the world does NASA contract out the construction of its vehicles to begin with??!

When there is a world where there is a fluid market of space agencies and vehicle makers, then yeah, let the free market decide. Until then though, let's let the governments "waste" their money by developing them themselves, ok?

types of failure

[Gary W. Longsine]

This seems to me to be a failure of NASA as much as Rocketplane Kistler. The objectives appear to be entirely unrealistic. NASA wants two separate companies to develop two separate vehicles capable of unmanned resupply of the ISS in a very short time frame. Now, this is an agency that has access to literally DOZENS of off the shelf rockets. None of them will do. This is an agency with experience spanning decades, working with several companies to design DOZENS of rockets. None of them cost any less than "many billions of dollars". I'm not saying that it won't be possible to develop a new rocket on the very limited budget and very limited timetable, but NASA would never be willing to do it on these terms. Private investors looked at that and saw what we are starting now to see: a project which is conceptually flawed, and which will almost certainly unravel before a rocket flies, and which will almost certainly not result in a profit on the investment.

Re:types of failure

[Nyeerrmm]

Umm, SpaceX seems do be doing just fine (yes, I know they haven't had a completely successful launch yet). They have designed and built a $6 million rocket capable of getting to LEO with a reasonable load, as well as have the tooling and parts for a much larger version. Granted they have an advantage over Rocketplane Kistler because Musk has a rather large piggy bank, but its still very minimal compared to what NASA, Boeing, Lockheed and Rocketdyne are doing.

There are a number of reasons for why they can do this while the big names fail, but among them are a small dedicated workforce in a Silicon Valley-like atmosphere, lack of reliance on public opinion, and a focus on the most cost-effective design rather than the most efficient. The whole point is to develop it in a way that NASA would never do under a traditional contract.

While its fair to withold judgment until the next launch (May I believe), I see no reason why the next Falcon 1 won't complete its mission, and neither does DARPA, besides plain old dumb luck which tends to affect all launch vehicles, even the Soyuz. Given a success, and more to follow, I don't think the concept is flawed; of course I don't know much about Rocketplane Kistler besides their suborbital design, and there approach may very well have been flawed.

Re:types of failure

[Teancum]

In spite of what you are suggesting here, I do think the COTS program is a poorly designed government program on many levels. There certainly is room to criticize NASA on the approach, and there are some additional methods/objectives that could have been done to help improve the whole program.

Even so, your comments about SpaceX being successful with COTS money are valid. Rocketplane Kistler and their financial model seemed to have been built around the idea that the NASA money would have been the payoff, and not simply some extra money to be earned along the way to a much larger goal. That is precisely what Elon Musk has been doing with SpaceX, as he looked at the NASA money earned this way as "free money" to help make his company even more profitable rather than the end goal of trying to make some money from the program. Rocket science is just too difficult to cut corners like Kistler was doing, and their financial resources simply weren't up to the task.

BTW, I'm curious about where you got the May date for the lanuch of the next Falcon 1? From what I understood, they were technically aiming for last December, but decided to give their engineers a much deserved and needed Christmas break, with the idea to pick up the pace in January for a 1st Quarter 2008 launch. I guess I missed the announcement that pushed this date back, unless you have some "inside" knowledge about SpaceX.

The "failed" launch they did earlier certainly got into space and even into orbit... much higher and faster than Scaled Composites' spacecraft and far and away much more reliable and better results than most of the early Redstone tests NASA did back in the 1950's. And Redstone eventually was a manned vehicle as well, I should add (look up Alan Sheppard and see what he flew in). I mention Scaled Composites simply because a valid criticism of Burton Rutan's spacecraft is that his technology in its current form is incapable of making a genuine leap into LEO due to raw energy requirement.

The earlier problems with the Falcon 1 were genuine engineering mistakes (forgetting some basic chemistry in regards to bolts/nuts on the first flight, and the problem with fuel sloshing in the tanks on the second flight), but those are also problems that can be refined and help to improve the manufacturing process. They are also engineering changes that can be adapted to Falcon 9, which also gives me some genuine hope. I have high confidence that if they can pull off a lanuch of the Falcon 1 successfully, that the Falcon 9 is also going to go up successfully as well. And it is the Falcon 9 that is going to have a much larger impact on the space launch business anyway, not to mention what will be the ultimate validation of the COTS program.