NASA Funded Commercial Space Projects Heating Up

coondoggie writes "NASA's role as commercial space entrepreneur is going well and the four companies it is funding to build future spacecraft that could take astronauts to and from the International Space Station and other destinations are moving forward. That was the chief observation in a status report the space agency issued this week entitled 'NASA's return on investment report.' You may recall that in April NASA split $270 million between Boeing ($92 million), Space Exploration Technologies (Space X--$75 million), Sierra Nevada ($80 million) and Blue Origin ($22 million) to continue development of commercial rockets and spacecraft capable of safely flying astronauts into orbit and to the International Space Station." Gubers33 pointed out another article about NASA's upcoming plans for Jupiter, Mars, and the Moon.

Re:Hardware That Doesn't Crash Or Blowup

[strack]

im pretty sure pretty much all rockets have failures early in their development careers. spacex mitigated that somewhat with having its failures on its smaller falcon 1 rocket, and once they ironed out the issues, built its larger more expensive falcon 9, which is 2 for 2 successes so far. so quit your anonymous coward bitching. spacex are putting more shit in space for less cost than the fucking chinese for fucks sake.

Re:NASA you are officailly bush league

[slackergod]

Actually, I'd be relatively ok with us fighting in space, if it meant we were trying to get into space to begin with.
Consider a hypothetical moon colony -

• * War requires developing countermeasures for missles and kinetic weapons - these are already needed to protect the colony from asteroids.
• * War requires radiation-hardening the colony against EM weapons - this is already needed to protect against solar flares and the like.
• * War requires developing more agile, efficient drives in order to out-maneuver the enemy? This just helps us colonize further.

Much as a I'd like space to be nice and peaceful, that doesn't seem to be in our natures right now - and just shifting the theater of conflict to space would put the well-funded military R&D pipelines on track to developing numerous technologies that we were going to need anyways - but they'd do it faster than if the goal was peaceful colonization, since it's now a matter of "national pride".