Companies Skeptical of Commercial Space Market 192
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that Boeing and Lockheed Martin will happily sell rockets to carry astronauts into space, but are leery about taking a leading role in President Obama's vision for a revamped NASA that relies on commercial companies to provide taxi transportation to the ISS. 'I don't think there is a business case for us,' says Lockheed Martin's John Karas about space taxis. Both Boeing and Lockheed were stung during the last burst of optimism for the commercial space business about a decade ago. They invested several billion dollars — Lockheed to develop its Atlas V, Boeing for the Delta IV — in the hopes that the huge market for commercial satellites would supplement their traditional business of launching American military spy satellites. The market did not materialize, and what business there was went to European and Russian rockets that were cheaper. The hoped-for commercial market for space taxis hinges on one small company, Bigelow Aerospace, which is developing inflatable space habitats that it hopes to market as research facilities to companies and foreign nations looking to establish a space program."
want NASA to foot the bill (Score:5, Informative)
Re:riiiight (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Government is Clueless about Business (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Government is Clueless about Business (Score:5, Informative)
From experience in the Navy, I can verify the fiscal thing. Each quarter, we would "purchase" things out of our own storerooms, so that the books balanced within a couple of dollars. Across the board, we did this. The galley (or kitchen, for you landlubbers), office supplies, paint, you name it. The money had to be spent, or lost. At the end of the fiscal year, same thing. Spend right down to the very last dollar, never turn money in, or the next year your budget would shrink.
Damn shame that things work that way. It's an incentive to waste.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What's wrong with cost plus? (Score:4, Informative)
The alternative is the producer puts in a quote and is stuck with it. If they fail to produce for that, then you get your money back.
I do not pay the costs of USPs truck breaking down when they deliver a package to me. They lose money on that delivery and make it up on the aggregate.
If you make a bid and it is too little, too fucking bad. Cost plus allows these companies to bid far lower than they know it will cost to produce these things and then jack the price up later.
Re:riiiight (Score:3, Informative)
In the other hand satellites for terrain imaging continue to be pretty successful. Space is the ultimate high ground after all.
Re:What happened to SpaceX (Score:3, Informative)
mod DOWN! (Score:5, Informative)
From a quick google search on NASA inventions:
Ten NASA inventions you use every day [howstuffworks.com]
Top 15 NASA inventions [telegraph.co.uk]
Polimide Foam [nasa.gov]
NASA Inventions benefiting our daily lives [about.com]
Highlights from those links include kidney dialysis, CAT scans, various types of insulation, efficient water purification tech, cordless tools, modern designs of microchips, satellite tech (you know, it deleives a great deal of your communications....), scratch resistant lenses... And there's a *lot* more, a great deal of modern tech comes from NASA is one way or another.
Even if you have a problem with exploration and a search for knowledge and understanding of the universe, you have to admit the space program and its SCIENCE have yielded *massive* results on earth in technology. I'm also pretty sure there were luddites like you when the first ships were being built, the first submarines, the first plans, hell, the first time someone said "I'm going to wander 50 miles that way and see what's there".
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:10 years + $20B and someone else gets elected (Score:3, Informative)
Neither? [newsweek.com]
Re:riiiight (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What's wrong with cost plus? (Score:1, Informative)
First off, I work in the industry, so anonymous.
Why do so many people get modded informative for completely misunderstanding how or why cost-plus is used?
First of all you pay an equivalent of cost plus for things in your day to day life all the time. Hire a plumber to fix your water heater, you're paying him hourly for his work. That's the equivalent of cost plus. Car breaks down? You're gonna pay for parts+labor, that's the equivalent of cost-plus. Here's one for all you web designers on slashdot. You get hired as a contractor to build a website, do you quote them a price and then complete the work for the original price even if it takes twice as long? Of course not. Why? Because the job almost never ends up being what the original requirements were, or it simply takes much more work than originally intended. Instead you hire on as a contractor and get paid for your time. The only real difference between these examples and a government cost-plus contract is that the government can decide what award fee to give you, (that's the plus in cost-plus), so if they don't like the job you did, you're getting no profit.
Cost-plus exists for one of a kind (or a few of a kind) jobs where it is impossible to know in advance exactly how much effort it will take. Like figuring out why the service-engine light in your car keeps coming on. Even when knowing the exact system in your car it could be anything from a loose wire to a bad sensor to a leak. In many cases the mechanic may be able to tell you exactly what it will take, but not all.
To visit the parents UPS example. UPS ships millions and millions of packages a year and operates thousands and thousands of trucks. What that means is that they can statistically estimate the cost to the company for each package, including the costs associated with losses, such as a truck breaking down or a package being lost. That's great, it means they have consistent pricing. But they can only do that because they continually do the exact same thing over and over again.
Say you're building a lunar rover. Obviously it's going to be a custom job, even if you've built a lunar rover before NASA isn't going to want the exact same thing. So you get their initial requirements and make a bid and you win. Then what? Well the company that makes the fault tolerant CPU you need has had declining sales, so the costs have gone up for that part. NASA added a requirement that resulted in you exceeding the power capabilities of your solar panels, so you have to scrap an entire system and restart design. Etc.
Now say you're selling F-16's. You've built hundreds and hundreds of F-16's, so guess what, when a country that you are allowed to export to wants to buy a few F-16's you sell them with a fixed price contract because you know almost exactly how much it will cost you to make more.
One other point. The parent says "Cost plus allows these companies to bid far lower than they know it will cost to produce these things and then jack the price up later". Sorry, no. The government reviews bids from multiple companies for a contract very thoroughly and understands what the bid covers, for 100,000+ man hour tasks they can be very accurate. The additional costs don't usually come from underbidding, they come from scope creep. This usually happens in two ways A) The requirements were incorrect to begin with and the scope of the bid was incorrect as a result. B) The government comes in with additional features they want. In both of these cases the problem is with the government playing funding games or not understanding what they want.
As an engineer I've seen far too many tasks go over-budget and even get canceled because of poor government requirements, politics, and funding games. Never once have I seen a large government contractor try to grow the costs of an effort (I have seen a company drop the hourly rate of their engineers they charge to the government to keep the customer from going over their budget though). Screwing over your customer is not a good way to stay in business, especially when the government representative shafted by you on one contract ends up deciding who wins the bid for the next.
Re:It's the size (Score:3, Informative)
The Tea Party Movement is nearly 100% about a return to the States that which the Federal government has hijacked unconstitutionally over the past 80 years.