NASA Outsources ISS Resupply To SpaceX, Orbital 151
DynaSoar writes "NASA has signed two contracts with US commercial space ventures totaling $3.5 billion for resupply of the International Space Station. SpaceX will receive $1.6 billion for 12 flights of SpaceX's planned Dragon spacecraft and their Falcon 9 boosters. $1.9 billion goes to Orbital for eight flights of its Cygnus spacecraft riding its Taurus 2 boosters. Neither of the specified craft has ever flown. However, the proposed vehicles are under construction and based on proven technology, whereas NASA has often contracted with big aerospace companies for services using vehicles not yet even designed."
Problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
The world isn't a simple as you make it out to be. Patents and copyrights lock things up, but trade secrets lock them up even more. Government intervention to make people act against their own interests is a never ending spiral. There's no way to mandate that people do good science. It's interesting that you mention national security. Current legislation basically makes good science and engineering in rocketry illegal.. cause any improvement to a rocket is an improvement to the death count of a potential weapon using that rocket. I, personally, care more about the progress of rocketry than I care about the number of potential lives lost in a potential war fought with potential rocket-based weapons in the potential future, but other people think differently.
Re:Problems (Score:5, Interesting)
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I know this is a common US principle that is largely ignored in practice, but it's not at all common in the rest of the world. I think it's a good idea.. but, frankly, it's totally irrelevant for rocketry as the governments of the world have decided that rocketry is just too damn awesome for making weapons to be freely able to be published.
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So there's
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Checked the news lately? Kim Jong Il ain't doing much these days (though his photoshopped image sure is getting around). The plans are safe!
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Keep your rocket under 600 mph, and you can use nearly any off-the-shelf [GPS] receiver to guide your rocket-bomb within 10m of it's target.
I'd love to see your idea of how a ballistic missile with any range could be kept under 600 mph...
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Well, just to bring this around to the topic at hand...
What you say is all well and good, but this story isn't about the government contracting design work. The companies were already designing and building the vehicles for their own private ventures. The government is buying passage on the companies' ships; they're a customer of said private ventures.
Buying use of a tool or service is not the same as buying the design.
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Sure. We'll just tell you how to make ICBMs (which is what most rockets basically are), nuclear bombs, F-22, stealth technology in general, the Blackbird, cruise missiles, warheads, explosives, carriers, and the supercomputers that the NSA use.
Or perhaps we won't.
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Maybe not. A friend of mine spend a few weeks, long ago, studying the characteristics of various US ICBMs to see if they were usable as orbital launch vehicles. It didn't take him long to learn that they weren't, partially because none of them had adequate delta-V. I'd be the last person to claim that we've reached a dead end in the development of guided or ballistic missiles, but I don't think tha
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http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=12225
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/LGM-118A_Peacekeeper
[quote]
The rockets are being converted to a satellite launcher role by Orbital SciencesOrbital Sciences Corporation, as the OSP-2 Minotaur IV SLVMinotaur (rocket), while their warheads will be deployed on the existing Minuteman III missiles.
[/quote]
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My friend did his study in the mid-70s. I don't think the Peacekeeper was designed until later, so no, he wasn't mistaken. None of the ICBMs that were in use at the time were adaptable as an orbital lift vehicle.
None of the ICBMs that were in use at the time that had not already been adapted as orbital launch vehicles were suitable for the task.
In the mid-1970s, the US had Minuteman I and II missiles, as well as Titan IIs which were in the process of being decommissioned. Titan IIs were quite capable of orbital launches, having been used for the Gemini program in the mid-60s. Fourteen of the decommissioned Titan IIs were hauled back out of mothballs and refurbished for space launches in the mid-80s.
Of the major US
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Thank you. I'd never asked him for details, and had to guess a little. Also, at the time I knew him, the incident was already over a decade old.
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For what it's worth, Mercury was launched atop Atlas (an ICBM), and Gemini was launched atop Titan II (another ICBM).
Sputnik was also launched atop an ICBM. And as far as I know, pretty much every Soviet launch vehicle except Proton was developed from that
Science (Score:5, Interesting)
Please provide us with the most recent scientific breakthrough not carried out by a government funded lab or subsidized university.
Don't worry. We'll wait.
You see, no corporation does anything beyond what's sensible to make a profit. And often that thing is actually detrimental to society without proper regulation, dependent on your definition of progress, and no company could survive the lawsuits if they focused on pure R&D instead of R&D designed to deliver a product for sale. Imagine a company formed for fusion reactor research, promising little to no chance of return for billions of dollars of investment. It wouldn't get off the ground, and would be the laughingstock of wall street. In this case, they are refining rocket technology, not inventing it.
Good science only happens when you throw huge amounts of money into pure research. Engineering happens trying to solve problems, but not advances in science. The government doesn't force people to research anything, but it does give out wads of cash for things it wants, like the technology found in Predator drones. This is because problems are now extraordinarily complicated and require huge investments to be solved. That's not to say there aren't rare exceptions... and definitely not to say that agencies like NASA aren't in need of serious restructuring. But for the most part, it's government funded research that provides modern technology.
Also, you're totally wrong about homeland security. It's funded billions of dollars for advanced aerospace research, but to large corporations instead of backyard enthusiasts.
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We were talking about engineering, but ok.
IBM does more basic science than any other company in the world.. outside Japan. They're also better financed and have institutional knowledge that exceeds most universities by light years. As for government labs, they're good for nuclear research and that's about it.
Re:Science (Score:4, Insightful)
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How about Microsoft Research [microsoft.com]?
While I'm a major critic of Microsoft as a company, some of their basic research activities are simply amazing and certainly aren't done through government subsidies.
Microsoft certainly isn't alone here, and private R&D does happen by forward thinking individuals and companies. IBM is another company who has done some incredible pure research in
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Bell Labs was an arm of a government granted monopoly that essentially taxed its users. You couldn't get phone service except through Bell at the price Bell charged. That price was regulated, and the incentive for a monopoly utility under that regime is to increase costs as far as humanly possible, because they were granted profit as a margin above its costs. Thus we have them doing justifiable but ... inefficient things like basic research.
After the monopoly was broken up, telephone calls became very,
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You are wrong. This fallacy of raw vs. net profits of enterprises has been refuted since the beginning of the 20th century by liberal theorists. If a company, say SpaceX, takes in a healthy profit, it is only because its successfully supplying a demand. Be sure that SpaceX will invest, not necessarily tons of money, but more importantly, more wisely and rationally than governments ever could, exactly because of their self-interest to make a buck.
It is the 'potentially democratic' governments that usually
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And what makes you think this (releasing) isn't done? (Not to mention your comment is a complete non sequitur.)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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And those questions are only very, very recently becoming valid.
If you remove Lockheed/Boeing/GD/Northrup (the commercial arm of NASA), there has not been a viable commercial launch capability until maybe 2 yrs ago. Those major players would never have done it without NASA, and NASA never had the actual factories to build it. Hence the synergistic relationship.
All the new players (Virgin, SpaceX, etc) are building off all the tech, i
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Riiiight... because no scientist would ever take a taxi to their lab, or call out for a pizza?
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The only thing keeping us from getting "missiled" at this point is that few countries have the ICBM technology to hit us. Which is why we're developing these "missile shields" (which sometimes work... the patriot missle defence is more or less useless at this point against modern missiles).
There are more reasons than just the lack of technology. If a country would ever attack the US in an organized strike (invasion, missiles, bombing raids, etc) we would nuke them and they know that. Also would be the lack of precession and rarity of materials needed to make ICBM, many developing countries can simply not spend that amount of money needed to make a single ICBM nor effectively deploy them. Honestly, nuclear war is, despite possible, considered to be useless by most countries as it would accom
Re:Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but there is nothing stopping them from swiping the plans for the rocket boosters and developing a few payload systems that could easily hit US shores with a dirty/chemical warhead. Technically, this would not result in massive retaliation. Technically, as we weren't nuked, but I have no idea how governments would react to this kind of attack. And frankly, if it was a terrorist/extremist group it would be just as bad I guess.
Just look at Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks, minor attacks that launched major offensive strikes by the USA. And, a terrorist group with an ICBM? I doubt that would ever happen, about the closest would be North Korea but as far as we know they only have slightly long range misses, not ICBMs, and because North Korea is so poor, I doubt they would have the capability to build one especially with international pressure along with resource constraints. The main threat is a nuclear device by a terrorist/extremist group, something more akin to a "suitcase nuke" than a full ICBM.
Either way, I'd really prefer it if our rocketry sciences weren't put into public domain
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I doubt that would ever happen, about the closest would be North Korea but as far as we know they only have slightly long range misses, not ICBMs, and because North Korea is so poor, I doubt they would have the capability to build one especially with international pressure along with resource constraints.
North Korea is pretty well understood to have a good source of money [heritage.org].
Why should I have to pay in part for a billion dollar exploration mission to Pluto?
Look, not everybody has a problem with the space program. Some of us are quite fond of it, even if all we see are pictures. The hairless ape is a curious beast, forever poking his nose into things. If you don't like Nasa, that's fine, but there are better things in the budget to cut. Certainly hiring these American companies to do this is better than continuing to hire Russia. Rumor has it Russia's commitment to international coopera
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You pay your taxes because if you don't they'll kill/imprison you. Stop deluding yourself and be thankful you get "some pretty pictures of a distant galaxy" out of it.
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At Pearl Harbor, the Japanese damaged twenty three American ships, three of them unrepairable. Two of the ships lost were battleships. They were the only American battleships sunk during WW II. I don't call that a minor attack, I call it a major defeat!
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battleships_of_the_United_States_Navy#Mid_to_late_1900s
The last ship, Wisconsin (BB-64), commissioned in 1944 (Wisconsin was approved last; however, Missouri commissioned 3 months later, due to delays from additional aircraft carrier construction)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack
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Yeah, because the CV's got the crap assignments. Sunday, in peacetime, is usually a time to stand down and do shore leave. The BB's were in port standing down, taking shore leave, while the CV's were at sea doing the kind of thing that usually causes the sailors to grouse about missing their Sunday liberty.
Note also that Pearl Harbor had just become the base for Pacific Fleet a few months earlie
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This is conventional wisdom, and not entirely correct. Consider the efforts by Third Fleet to sink the Japanese battleships at Leyte Gulf. Which battleships h
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Neither the Repulse nor the Prince of Wales were battleships. They were both battlecruisers. That was a class of ship with a battleship's guns, engines and hull, but the armor of a heavy cruiser. The idea was that they could outrun anything they couldn't beat and win against anything that could catch it. Oddly enough, it was the only class of ship t
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Repulse was a battlecruiser, but Prince of Wales was a battleship. The second King George V class battleship, in fact, and as new and modern as any in the world at the time. Unfortunately, Churchill felt the need to make a gesture, and expended her to make it.
Note also that there was an alternate definition of ba
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Your definition of battlecruiser is one of the standard ones. But, when it comes right down to it, some "battlecruisers" were so labelled for different reasons. Around WW1, the Brits labelled a battleship a battlecruiser because she was capable of more than 24 knots. She (HMS Hood) was later sunk by the Bismark.
Using that particular definition (which the USA never used), the last eight battleships built in US yards were "battlecruisers".
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Plus that armour. Mustn't forget the armour. You remember that part? The armour that survived a nuclear explosion at Bikini Atoll. Nevada survived an aerial detonation at 615 yards, Arkansas at 620 yards, Nagata at 900 yards. Note that the first test bomb exploded about 600 yards from its aimpoint (it was intended to detonate directly over Nevada, which would have left it about the same distance fro
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Shore bombardment. There were four battleships (two US) at D-Day, and others at just about every major landing in the Pacific. That's why we keep the New Jersey around. There's something about exploding VWs in close formations of nine that nothing less than a nuke or FAE can compare with, and they can be used in places where nothing else is appropriate. And, with a range of 25 nautical miles, you don't hav
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Alas, the Jersey has been out of commission for 17 years or s
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And for a very good reason, too. Keeping a battleship in commission when there's no current use for it is very expensive. Mothballing it not only saves money, it saves wear and tear on what is now very old equipment. No point using up its service life when there's no mission needing it. Close air support is great; it's more flexible than artillery, but there are times that what you really need is 2100 pound shells coming screaming down fro
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Or get a bunkerbuster bomb out of stores, and drop it on top. Again, nothing the battleship can do that can't be done by something else. Except sink battleships.
Note that with the Jersey in mothballs, it's effectively unavailable for any war that takes less than years. And we don't do so much of that anymore.
Yeah, Iraq has lasted years. But since Bush first said "mission accomplished", there has be
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A battleship is designed to do two things: dish out considerable punishment to anything it hits and survive an equivalent licking from its opponent while doing so. I suggest that you look at how many bombs and torpedoes it took to put down the Yamato and Musashi. In the Musashi's case, it took 17 bombs
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2016? In Obama's Term. (Score:3, Insightful)
The article states that the contracts are valid through 2016. But, will this last when Obama comes in to office, with the expected cuts? I do realize that this is important for the future functions, but is it the biggest priority for the new president?
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These actually sound exactly like the kinds of things he'd go for. Slashing launch/supply costs, improving the domestic commercial space sector, not just shipping it all out to russia? I'm sure he'd see that as a win/win/win.
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Slashing launch/supply costs? Did you look at these contracts? Between then, they're moving less in the way of supplies than a single shuttle flight could, for "only" $3.5 billion.
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I miss sci.space.tech!
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I don't want to move to Titan. I wanna turn Mars and Venus into Earth 2 and 3.
New Possibilities (Score:3, Insightful)
In theory this is not much different than contracting rocket engines to Thiokol or communication systems to Motorola. In practice however this might prove to be a boon to NASA. Not only does it allow for the centralization of specific projects under one roof, it allows commercial companies to organize entire projects instead of merely building ships - I'm of the opinion private industry can organize and meet specific goals better than the government. With that NASA can allow private competition for public funds to improve space transportation systems; and therefore serve as the arbiter of their performance. On top of that NASA can further focus on its most important job: conducting experiments in space and preparing for manned missions to the Moon and beyond (if it ever does become feasible).
Hell of a deal (Score:4, Informative)
$1.6 billion for 12 flights of SpaceX's planned Dragon spacecraft and their Falcon 9 boosters. $1.9 billion
Compared to the shuttle, it's a pretty damn good deal.
Re:Hell of a deal (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA said it was looking for each selected team to deliver a minimum of 20 metric tons to the space station over the seven-year life of the contract
At $1.6B for 20 metric tones per contract thats about $36,287 per pound. So it's actually a good deal if you take the worst cost estimate of the Shuttle running $40,000 a pound. And that the company only does the bare minimum. for the twelve launches for the Falcon 9 at $1.6B that comes out to $133M.
Re:Hell of a deal (Score:5, Informative)
Not bad considering it costs $450 million per shuttle launch.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttle_faq.html [nasa.gov]
Q. How much does it cost to launch a Space Shuttle?
A. The average cost to launch a Space Shuttle is about $450 million per mission.
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Re:Hell of a deal (Score:4, Interesting)
Their intention is to get the Falcon9 and Dragon man-rated. The published development schedule appears to be fairly agressive. In some respects, I believe they are further along than the Ares 1 and Orion CEV programs are. Imagine a COTS program comprised of crew transport to and from the ISS or LEO.
Obama's space transition team seems to be imagining this as well:
http://www.space.com/news/081202-obama-space-spending.html [space.com]
The transition team also wants information from NASA about accelerating plans for using the agency's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to fund demonstrations of vehicles capable of carrying crews to the international space station, a proposal Obama supported during his campaign.
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Well, speaking as a liberal, mere efficiency is not the only measure of a government program. While efficiency is good it's not the only good; given two social programs, a more efficient one is not necessarily better if it doesn't accomplish as much.
Here we have a case in point. These companies might not be much, or any more financially efficient; given the nature of the Shuttle's design and program history, it should be possible for NASA itself to do much, much more financially efficient launches. So
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At $1.6B for 20 metric tones per contract thats about $36,287 per pound. So it's actually a good deal if you take the worst cost estimate of the Shuttle running $40,000 a pound. And that the company only does the bare minimum. for the twelve launches for the Falcon 9 at $1.6B that comes out to $133M.
That's for a minimum of 20 metric tons and they don't pay the $1.6 billion up front. If the contractors fail to deliver, they don't continue to get paid by the contract. If these contractors can launch 50-60 metric tons more per year including manned flights (includes Shuttle payload, crew rotation, and a propellant boost each time the Shuttle docks with the ISS), then you can disband the Shuttle early. That's more than two billion dollars a year drain on NASA that can be directed into something else.
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Compared to the shuttle, it's a pretty damn good deal.
Just to elaborate on that... a Space Shuttle [wikipedia.org] has a payload to orbit of 24,400kg. The shuttle costs $500-$1,500 million per flight (depending on how you tabulate it). SpaceX's Falcon 9 Heavy [wikipedia.org] has a payload to orbit of 27,500kg. The commercial price per flight is $90 million; under the current contract SpaceX is charging a fixed price of $133 million per flight, which presumably is higher due to the cost of the Dragon capsule [wikipedia.org] and development fees.
That makes SpaceX's price for delivery to the space station 4x-1
Re:Fat Chance (Score:2)
I imagine that when NASA launches a Falcon 9, they will manage to spend hundreds of millions on themselves somehow as well (you know, planning it, managing it, quality control, etc). Fixed and sunk costs that are now considered to be in the Space Shuttle launch, but will now be transfered to SpaceX and Oribital Sciences.
In fact if I know my NASA, I bet in the end they will somehow make these launches even more expensive than the Shuttle is/was, especially with the economic downturn conveniently justifying p
Re:Hell of a deal (Score:5, Informative)
Under the current contract, SpaceX is selling about 10% of their payload for 12 flights for $133 million. Remember, they're only promising to deliver 20 tons over 12 flights, NOT the 240 tons they'll be pushing into space in those 12 flights.
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Thanks for pointing that out. I wonder if SpaceX has the option to fly a Falcon 9 Heavy instead of a normal Falcon 9 if they wish to, because of the better cost-efficiency. With a Falcon 9 Heavy they could lift up the prearranged NASA payload, while also selling the excess payload mass to make additional money.
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Only if you make the most simplistic of comparisons. The Shuttle's cargo capacity is 24k kg, while the Falcon 9's total capacity is 27k kg. Which means the amount delivered by Falcon will less than you think because you haven't accounted for the cargo delivery vehicle. For reference (dry weights), Progress weighs 7k kg, HTV weighs about 10k kg, ATV comes in at a whopping 20k kg. (Which means even the simplest existing delivery vehicle eats just over a
The big deal here: launch costs getting cut in 1/2 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The big deal here: launch costs getting cut in (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The big deal here: launch costs getting cut in (Score:5, Interesting)
Boeing/Lockheed/Thiokol initially only charged 1/2 the final rate too. What will the actual bill from SpaceX be, once they can suck at the govt's teat?
One big difference is that Boeing/Lockheed/Thiokol have cost-plus contracts, where if you increase the final bill you make more money. SpaceX and Orbital have fixed-price contracts, where if SpaceX or Orbital's cost estimates are too low, the companies eat the extra cost; on the other hand, if the companies figure out ways to do things more efficiently, they get more of a profit. Doing space launches under this sort of arrangement is almost unprecedented for NASA, and hopefully something we'll see much more of in the future.
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They could mandate those contracts, because they could. They were already big players. SpaceX and Orbital aren't. Yet.
Their costs will go up to meet the inevitable requirement creep, and so will the final bill.
We need more players in the game. But let's not delude ourselves that the new kids will be that much better/cheaper, while retaining the same performance & safet
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Their costs will go up to meet the inevitable requirement creep, and so will the final bill.
I think you may be missing something here... as I mentioned in my comment, this is a fixed-price contract, not a cost-plus contract. The requirements (deliver a certain quantity of tonnage to orbit) are already set, and the final price is already set. SpaceX and Orbital get money as they reach contracted development milestones and make actual cargo deliveries. If their costs go up, they either eat the cost and make less of a profit, or they don't make any more money at all.
But let's not delude ourselves that the new kids will be that much better/cheaper, while retaining the same performance & safety factors.
This is an interesting belief. Do
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Lets take those in order:
There are a lot of reasons to believe SpaceX will have a
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We need more players in the game. But let's not delude ourselves that the new kids will be that much better/cheaper, while retaining the same performance & safety factors. Space ops is expensive.
Perhaps you should learn what's actually going on first. We have two bits of information. First, development of the current SpaceX vehicles on what is a paltry amount for space development, a mere few hundred million. Orbital too has a history of cheap development costs with the Pegasus and related launch vehicles. Second, these companies accept a more difficult type of contract than the typical cost plus contracts. I consider this a significant demonstration of intent. Cost plus means you pay the company i
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It's only .005 TARPS (Score:4, Funny)
Why should anyone complain about this? For all of his other faults, the Bush administration has given us some great new units of federal spending that we can use the same way we measure storage capacity with "libraries of congress". Why think in terms of millions or billions or even trillions, when we can say that this new NASA contract is only .005 TARPs, 0.00583 Iraq wars, 0.014 Katrinas, 0.00875 Medicare Prescription Drugs, and 0.0175 Farm bailouts.
It's chump change!
I'm glad I'm around to see it. (Score:2)
I've always been a big Robert Heinlein fan, and the character of D.D. Harriman was particularly fun to imagine.
With this, it looks like Bob's vision of commercial space flight is finally starting to stretch to the plateau that he saw. I'm more than excited: maybe this means that that elusive space elevator is possible too? Oh, not by the same people, but hey! Maybe that's the next step.
In any case, kudos to the two companies. Thanks for seeing Mr. Heinlein's vision come true.
What's special about this? (Score:2)
It doesn't sound any different than Lockheed or NGC getting $3 billion. The concept drawings from any of these companies are equally far from the real thing. Maybe the CEO of SpaceX is worth a little more than the Lockheed CEO. It's not the populist access to space we envisioned 5 years ago. We only think it is because Elon Musk says so.
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It doesn't sound any different than Lockheed or NGC getting $3 billion.
As I've noted in another comment, the difference is that Lockheed/NGC have cost-plus contracts, while this is a fixed-price contract. Lockheed et al get more money if they go overbudget. SpaceX has to pay the cost if they go overbudget.
The concept drawings from any of these companies are equally far from the real thing. Maybe the CEO of SpaceX is worth a little more than the Lockheed CEO.
Concept drawings? SpaceX's Falcon 9 has already been transported to Cape Canaveral [spacex.com], and will be fully assembled and vertical within the next week.
More details (Score:3, Informative)
For anyone looking for more info, here's some handy links:
* RLV News's link round-up on the announcement [hobbyspace.com]
* Notes from the question-and-answer teleconference after the announcement [hobbyspace.com]
Some pasted notes from the teleconference which were missing from the article linked in the summary:
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Because using american tax dollars to pay russian salaries isn't good economic sense.
Duh.
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Re:why not contract with the russians? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well...lets see:
Mercury-earth orbit - totally unproven, until someone did it.
Gemini-2 man, docking with another craft in orbit - totally unproven, until someone did it.
Apollo-Landing on the moon and coming back - totally unproven, until someone did it.
Do we want to stick with the old, (semi)safe stuff, or do we want to bring some new minds and technologies on board?
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Politics is surely part of the equation. You might recall not long ago there was a question over whether, in light of Russian treatment of the Ossetia conflict, the U.S. would extend the exemption that allowed NASA to contract for passage on Russian flights in spite of the Anti-Proliferation Act (can't remember the full title of the act; it's a US law that limits trade with countries that don't cooperate with our nuclear non-proliferation vision). I don't know what ever happened to that, but it highlights
Re:obama is gonna be happy (Score:4, Insightful)
Most importantly, outsourcing our space program to $CHEAP_NATION [huffingtonpost.com] is even more shameful than outsourcing our other jobs!
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2. Start building
3. Sign with NASA
4. ???
5. Profit!
wait...
There is no step four, just sign the billion dollar contracts and hope that they don't notice that they prototype is made out of cardboard before your private jet takes off...
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That seems to be pretty much true for Orbital Systems, since their "launch vehicle" is in "the early stages of development".
SpaceX at least HAS a launch vehicle. Sitting on the pad (figuratively) at Canaveral for launch early next year. Whether it'll work is another question, of course, though all the components were basically tested
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Why don't we privatize our armed forces next..
Hehe, you don't read the paper much do you? There's a whole lot of contracted "security" firms in Iraq right now being paid by the US government. You might remember some of them were running a prison.. you might remember the atrocities. Ya.
Anyway, space tourism will pay for itself.. give it time.
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Umm.. about the only people who are doing space tourism is the russians.. and they are doing it to subsidize their national space program. Maybe soon we'll see Virgin Galactic doing some suborbital space tourism.. and that's being done without a nickle of tax payer funds. So, what, exactly, are you on about?
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I'm trying desperately to see a coherent argument here. Are you complaining that your tax dollars are being squandered.. cause, ya know, that's what governments do. If you're pissed at the cost of ISS, maybe you shouldn't take a look at the national budget any time soon. If you're all about scientific research, maybe you shouldn't look at the kind of research the NSF chooses to fund. I'm still trying to understand what any of this has to do with space tourism. Or are you basically saying that people sh
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Then you're one up on the politicians. The justification for the ISS was that it would keep Russian engineers busy making peaceful space stations rather than working on missile technology which they would most likely be selling to Iran and other nations that the US considers likely to result in destabilization of the middle east.. which is where all the oil is.. which is an important resource.. I don't know how much depth I need to get into here, you seem pretty naive. If the ISS can serve some sort of us
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What?!! You think building pyramids will get people to space?
When you say "no public benefit", I think you forgot to finish the sentence properly, you missed out the "that I know of" bit. It's a very narrow mind that assumes nothing exists beyond it's own knowledge. I would say that kind of mind doesn't serve the public one bit, but thinking about it, I've been to macdonalds.
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What?!! You think building pyramids will get people to space?
Yeah. I mean obviously they're landing pads, not space ships.
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Wow, next think you know we might be using public taxpayer money to buy privately-built cars and seats on commercially-operated airliners for transporting government personnel!